After spending nearly a decade trying to reconcile two agencies' health-care records, little progress has been made The U.S. Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs still aren’t able to share complete electronic health records of military members and veterans despite working on a project for nine years, employees of the two agencies told a congressional committee Wednesday.While the two agencies have begun to share some text records, including discharge summaries and emergency-room reports, it won’t be until 2008 before they can share vital signs of patients, laboratory data, and family histories, said Dr. Gerald Cross, principal deputy undersecretary of health in the VA’s Veterans Health Administration.Officials from both agencies told the U.S. House of Representatives Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations they’re making good progress, but issues remain. “The work to make data computable between two different health-care systems is very complex and requires complete standardization of data,” Cross said. And the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has yet to see a comprehensive plan from the two agencies to share e-health records, added Valerie Melvin, director of human capital and management information systems issues for the GAO. The GAO has issued multiple reports since 2001 calling for VA and DOD to improve their health records sharing, she noted.The agencies have made progress on short-term projects to share data between some health-care centers, she said.“These exchanges are limited, as significant work still remains to achieve the long-term goal of a comprehensive electronic medical record,” Melvin said. It’s unclear how a number of ad hoc projects will fit into an e-health record program, she said. Lawmakers stressed the importance of getting a record-sharing program in place as wounded military members come back from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and will get medical service from both agencies. “This is a critically important issue,” said Rep. Harry Mitchell, an Arizona Democrat and subcommittee chairman. “Thousands of our servicemen and women require and will continue to require significant medical care.”While lawmakers called for the agencies to move faster, the GAO noted some progress. The agencies have developed repositories for health data and are starting to populate them with data, a GAO report said. Seven DOD and VA sites are using an interface to the data repositories, the report said.“Much work” remains before the e-health records sharing system is fully operational, the report said. The DOD and VA effort has been plagued by several setbacks in the past nine years. An interface for a data repository was delayed for more than a year at one point, and in July 2002, the agencies split the project into two initiatives after multiple delays.In July, after nine years of work, the two agencies awarded a contract for a consultant to conduct a feasibility study for a common inpatient health record system.Together, the two agencies have spent more than $1.8 billion on health records initiatives since 1998, according to the GAO. But officials from both agencies expressed optimism. Asked if they could share all data within a year, three officials from the DOD and one from the VA said they expect that to happen.“We are all working toward the same end — to provide the highest-quality care to our nation’s heroes, past and present,” said Dr. Stephen Jones, the DOD’s principal deputy assistant secretary for health affairs. Databases