Last month, we posted on reports that the Department of Defense (DoD) was working with both Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault to provide military personnel and their families a PHR.  On Friday, the DoD formally announced the launch of MiCare, their PHR for beneficiaries.  MiCare will provide users with a pre-populated PHR that includes such information as:

demographic information, active medication lists, their allergy data, lab results, radiology results, personal problem list, past visits, upcoming appointments and inpatient/outpatient documentation

This data will be drawn from the military’s EMR, AHLTA.  Chilmark Research is assuming that the military took a similar “roll-your-own” (RYO) approach to building the PHR, to interface with their propriatary, RYO EMR.

Beneficiaries will be able to choose between Google Health or Microsoft’s HealthVault as the repository of choice for their health data.  The PR also quotes Markle’s Connected for Health framework as guidance for addressing privacy and security of health records.

As great as this announcement appears on the surface, afterall, 9.1M potential users across the entire military is a very big number, eclipsing Dossia by ~1M, currently the DoD is doing a very limited roll-out of MiCare to one modest-sized, military hospital (Madigan Army Medical Center) in Tacoma WA.  At this time, the DoD has not announced a broader roll-out schedule and until we see that, it remains to be seen just how big a story this really is.