The benefits of patients being able to access their own health data is increasingly being understood and adopted around the world. Patient centricity, as this is known, gives individuals greater insight and control over their health and treatment.
It could be hugely beneficial to the military, which faces a unique and challenging set of circumstances in ensuring that its troops are fit to fight.
The health and wellbeing of military personnel is obviously of paramount importance, but complicated by the fact that the structure they operate in is huge and complex – both in theatre and in peacetime.
Servicemen and women needed to be treated at home and in the field by the National Health Service (NHS) across the four nations, as well as by allies such as NATO when abroad. Health records, too, are particularly sensitive in security terms, as they potentially identify where personnel have been, or where operations have been held.
But the major challenge is the key need of any military medic, anywhere, to be able to access the latest information about their patient on demand.
Project Cortisone is an ambitious UK military initiative which is trying to find a solution that works across all these complex moving parts. The project aims to build an information capability that will support the aim of the Defence Medical Services in promoting, protecting and restoring the health of the defence population to maximise their fitness.
It aims to:
- Increase digital medical capabilities
- Provide vaccine data visibility to optimise its fighting force for deployment
- Produce only high-quality data
- Ensure any new systems integrate with the NHS across the four nations, as well as NHS Local digital services
- Use datasets outside of traditional clinical results to help assess and inform non-clinical indicators such as overall wellbeing, state of mind, diet and behaviour.
Data interoperability between different systems is key, so that clinical records can be synchronised, generating an aggregated patient record as well as the ability to share that data as needed, across differing nations and systems.
Digi.me is the brainchild of a former aeronautical engineer with decades of experience in data interoperability. Julian Ranger developed the iSMART process that is still used for interoperability management by militaries worldwide today. He founded STASYS in 1987 and grew it to a staff of 230, with subsidiaries in the USA, Germany, Malaysia and Australia before selling to Lockheed Martin in 2005.
Julian said: “Digi.me is built on the principles of iSMART, and two US military programs (BACN and CLIP), which are essential elements of military network interoperability today.
“By placing the aggregation and interoperability layer at the point of most traffic, the individual service personnel in this case, digi.me ensures medical personnel can always access full normalised medical records, secretly and privately, direct from the service personnel being treated wherever they are in the world.”
Digi.me is a global platform built on military principles and approaches to security that already connects in to a multitude of health systems worldwide including those in Iceland, Emis in the UK as well as Cerner and Epic in the US, with many others on the way. It is – deliberately and by design – standards agnostic, to enable a “global personal data grid” which can work across any setting.
Ultimately, digi.me enables a private and secure ecosystem through its unique Private Sharing SDK – a platform that others can build their own apps and services on.
The open and standards agnostic model enables a plug and play eco-system to evolve, and to transition to new systems and architecture with rapid innovation covering all systems and services old and new.
If you are a contractor bidding for Cortisone which needs a proven secure and innovative technical partner to work with, we’d love to talk. For more information on developing with digi.me, or building direct on our platform, please contact Dan Bayley, our VP health, on dan@digi.me