U.S. Military Using Business Intelligence To Track Wounded SoldiersU.S. Military Using Business Intelligence To Track Wounded Soldiers

The U.S. Department of Defense is using business intelligence tools to help track and monitor injured and sick military personnel as they're transported for medical care globally.

The U.S. Transportation Command, which operates under the Defense Department, is responsible for deployment and distribution of military assets and equipment globally. But over the last several years, U.S. Transcom, as it's called, has been rolling out Information Builders' WebFocus business intelligence tools to improve planning of medical care for and monitoring of injured or sick military personnel while they're in transit.

The Trac2es system -- which is short for Transcom Regulating and Command and Control Evacuation System -- includes decision support, reporting, and analysis tools used for tracking and coordinating movement of patients for medical care, said Lt. Col. Keith Lostroh, functional program manager of Trac2es.

The business intelligence tools are helping the U.S. military track soldiers who are injured and need to be evacuated from battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as military personnel stationed elsewhere across the globe who need to travel more than 100 miles for less-urgent medical care.

The tools provide "in-transit visibility" of these patients so that the military medical facilities are better prepared with appropriate medical staff and services to treat these patients' often complex needs when they arrive, with the goal of ultimately improving the outcome of the patients, said Lostroh.

By entering into the system critical information about a patient, including demographic data and clinical data about the severity of an injury, military personnel can make better informed decisions about things like whether it's safe for the patient to fly to another facility for care and how quickly that needs to happen.

On the other end, clinical personnel use the system to have better insight into the kind of treatment the patient will need upon arrival. The goal is to minimize the patient's suffering and complications, as well as provide updates to military leaders.

Lostroh said, "Once a patient starts movement, we can tell the leaders where the person is," such as being transported from a medical unit near where an injury occurred in battle to larger medical facilities in the region or even back to hospitals in the United States, such as Brooke Army Medical Burn Center in Austin, Texas, or Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

The system also tracks the transport of military patients who are well enough to travel on commercial air carriers, he said. Such routine care could include military personnel based in noncombat U.S. bases in the world needing to travel for nonemergency medical care, such as a solider based in the Pacific Rim needing allergy treatment at a health facility in Hawaii.

The need for a system like Trac2es was identified years ago. "During the Gulf War, there wasn't good visibility for in-transit [patients]," Lostroh said.

Work on the Transcom system began in 2001, about a month before 9/11, said Lostroh. Over the last few years, a second version of the system -- Trac2es -- has been rolling out globally and will be fully operational by July. By then, a "subsystem" that includes patient quality-of-care tools and other analytic tools also will be part of Trac2es.

"If an incident doesn't go well, we can enter the details [and] look to see if it needs to be further investigated" so that care is improved for other patients in the future, Lostroh said. The system also can help military personnel analyze whether there's a breakout of illness in certain regions, such as in undeveloped nations where U.S. military personnel are based and where sanitation needs to be improved.

Trac2es has about 2,500 users now, and that will grow to about 3,000 users globally, including medical clerks, nurses, doctors, and military leaders.

The system also allows the Department of Defense to generate reports about military injuries, how many patients were injured, how many of them required flights, and the services they needed. A goal is to use this information to improve planning and care of patients so that they have improved outcomes in the future, Lostroh said.

In the past, the various branches of the military, including the Navy and Army, had their own software for recording patient movement, but those systems "didn't talk" to one another, he said.

The WebFocus tools analyze data in a Transcom Oracle database, and the system is securely accessed via a Web browser, said Michael Corcoran, Information Builders' VP of corporate strategy.

The system provides a "view of individual" in transit, but also has capabilities for the military to track and analyze "bigger-picture trends" in real time, he said.

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