Background Information
What is DVEIVR? What is this DVEIVR ocular data repository?
DVIEVR is a joint initiative between the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs' vision care communities to manage an ocular care clinical data repository. It is a location for both DoD and VA's eye care community including clinical providers, researchers and academia to review and research data collected on eye care diagnosis, surgical intervention, operative procedures, visual acuity, and treatment for our service members and veterans injured in battle.
Why is DVEIVR a benefit to the eye care community?
With DVEIVR, eye care providers can review longitudinal eye care data for our service members and veterans. DVEIVR captures and shares data on treatment from the point of injury through follow on care, including VA. This aggregate of data helps the vision care community make improvements to eye care enhances, enhance how eye care treatment improvements are made, guides eye care research, and helps to improve or enhance clinical practice guidelines.
How were you able to successfully build this joint data sharing capability between the DoD and VA?
The DoD and VA's vision community identified the same need, which is the need to view longitudinal data on eye care provided to their patients to improve patient outcomes. The singular focus on patient outcomes allowed the vision community to be specific with the IT developers when it came to defining their requirements. The community continues to stay involved and vested in the development of the IT solution reviews. The result is a one of a kind IT innovation based on meeting the requirements of the functional community.
Can other communities of interest besides the vision community leverage DVEIVR?
DVEIVR is a government owned system leveraging a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that is standardized, reusable, and independent. Therefore, the DVEIVR is a viable product that can be used by other communities of interest.
DoD and VA have several projects they are working on to share service members' information. What made this project a success and innovative for the vision community?
Taking the community of interest approach in building requirements, along with an agile project management methodology for system development contributed significantly to the success of the DVEIVR. The work with DVEIVR is with a specific community, the vision care community, as opposed to the multiple specialties that come with big medicine. The vision community knew what they needed their data to do and the DVEIVR system was built to those requirements. This approach allowed for the customer’s requirements to be heard and a solution geared towards exactly what they needed.