The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) have started a latest initiative that enables the VA to share veteran medical records electronically with SSA to more rapidly make decisions about disability claims.
For decades, SSA gained veteran medical records through a manual procedure that involved fax and regular mail. Although, the VA claims that the latest national initiative puts in place an automated procedure to get these records completely through electronic sharing.
“VA’s partnership with Social Security will finally make better the quality of life for veterans and their dependents by determining veterans to share their health data within a protective and secure health-related consumer application,” claimed VA’s Under Secretary for Health David Shulkin, MD.
The VA shares health information with SSA through The Sequoia Project’s eHealth Exchange, a national network for safe sharing of veteran medical records, which enables disability processing sites to get the medical records of VA electronically upon request.
“It took much time to get a disability determination from the SSA, significantly due to the slow, snail mail manual procedure of getting medical information,” stated by Michael Matthews, eHealth Exchange coordinating committee member and board chair for The Sequoia Project.
The latest automated procedure basically has 3 steps:
- SSA 1st receives the veteran consent—good for 1 year from the veteran signature date.
- SSA sends message electronically to VA attesting to the consent, following the standards of national eHealth Exchange.
- SSA then can retrieve the veteran’s continuity of care document in real time.
In accordance to the VA, the capability to share records electronically with Social Security disability processors saves time and money for those veterans and dependents applying for benefits. While the companies have been exchanging live data since the day of October 11, they said it is “too early to verify an actual cost savings as the partnership is in its initial stages of deployment.”
The Sequoia Project asserts that its eHealth Exchange is the “greatest health data sharing network of its kind.” In addition to SSA and VA, the national network also serves data sharing by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as well as the Department of Defense.
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