The heart and soul of Medical Situational Awareness in the Theater (MSAT) is medical surveillance. Annex J, Appendix J-1 of the Commander's Guide to MC4 explains how MSAT can assist in generating data slides that will depict the medical situation of a unit. Along with the Commander's Guide there is a medical surveillance reference guide that explains how to make reports using Business Objects.
MSAT has a large number of report options. My personal recommendation is to begin by focusing only on three to four reports that most closely pertain to a unit’s surveillance requirement. Here are a few hints on how to effectively use this function downrange:
Create one or two filters. First, make one basic filter that includes your subordinate units. Also consider making another filter that includes the units that are physically located in your area of operation. To learn more about creating filters in MSAT, read Creating Joint Medical Workstation Filters in MSAT .
Use Patient Workload reports. MSAT can help give visibility to the number of medical visits from reporting units. It is infantry simple to create an activity report of medical encounters. It is also simple to download the Patient Encounter Module (PEM) count information into Microsoft Excel and then create a table or graph that can be used for briefing slides, etc.
Conduct disease and injury surveillance. Discovering disease outbreaks is the most important feature available in MSAT. There are many canned reports within MSAT that a headquarter staff officer, clinician or nursing leader can use for basic battlefield medical surveillance. This includes several styles of disease non-battle injury (DNBI) reports, pre-defined symptom group reports and existing custom surveillance reports (CSRs). Users can subscribe to these CSRs as these will meet the needs of most MSAT users.
Create customized surveillance reports. An MSAT user can make custom ad hoc medical surveillance reports using the International Classification of Disease, 9th Revision (ICD-9) codes. Users can also create reports based on the MEDCIN terms in AHLTA-T encounters.
Use Business Objects reports. Business Objects reports are powerful!! MSAT Business Object reports are a commercial-grade reporting tool that enables users to generate many standard report templates that are present in JMeWS. The program allows users to search in detail for a large percentage of data elements from any encounter. MSAT Business Objects reports provide a robust reporting tool that will search the entire Theater Medical Data Store (TMDS) and MSAT database. Business Objects is a little tricky to learn, but once a user gets the hang of it, it can make life as a non-commissioned officer or staff officer easier.
MSAT has a lot of screens, tabs and choices. The easiest approach for quickly using this web-based program is to focus on the three to four reports that produce the basic data that are necessary for the job. The next step is to export the information into Excel where pivot tables and graphs can be presented during the command briefs. Once a user is comfortable with the basics, then trial and error represents a great methodology for either modifying existing ad hoc reports, or creating new ones from scratch.
I strongly recommend that MSAT users dig deeper and obtain more information on how to use these tools. Check out The Gateway for more Tips and FAQs on MSAT and Business Objects.