The Defense Health Agency is prototyping a new Virtual Education Center to provide Military Health System patients with a slate of personalized, vetted, and timely medical information to address questions that inevitably arise between appointments.

Health care providers will be able to quickly send case-specific medical information to patients via email or text message. It is an option medical experts say is better and more reliable than seeking information from the internet that may not always be accurate or appropriate for an individual patient's situation.

"One of our goals is to eventually marry this vetted information through the VEC with the emerging rollout of the MHS GENESIS Patient Portal, part of the Department of Defense's new electronic medical record system", explained Army Lt. Col. (Dr.) Maria Molina, Chief of the Medical Modernization and Simulation Division, Education and Training Directorate, at the DHA headquarters in Falls Church, Virginia.

Molina credited Army Lt. Gen. (Dr.) Ronald Place, DHA Director, for drawing attention to the importance of health literacy and the relative lack of organized information for patients, stating, "Lt. Gen. Place raised these concerns in the spring of 2020 and DHA launched new research on patient health care education across the MHS, which concluded in December and confirmed that there was indeed a gap."

"When a patient sees me, I often need to search in multiple places to gather take-home information related to their condition, which is inefficient and a poor use of the limited time I have with my patients," said Molina, who is an obstetrician-gynecologist and works one day a week at nearby Fort Belvoir Community Hospital.

"But, currently, there is no easy, consolidated way for me to give them vetted patient education," she elaborated.

Molina collaborated with the Program Manager for Medical Simulation & Training, part of DHA's Component Acquisition Executive, to translate the Education & Training Directorate needs into a solution. A contract to build the VEC prototype was awarded in September.

The VEC project aligns with DHA's "Ready Reliable Care" framework and the agency's goal of "Satisfied Patients".

"We have a vendor who has developed this capability on the commercial side and it is an incredible product," said Brett Lord, Assistant Program Manager for PM MST, headquartered in Orlando, Florida.