Hospital Ships Convert to TMIP-J

 The U.S Navy ship Comfort and her sister ship Mercy are the Navy’s two current hospital ships operated by the Military Sealift Command. For years, the hospital ships used the Composite Health Care System (CHCS) to support patient care documentation. The system allows clinicians to electronically perform patient appointment and scheduling, order lab tests, authorize radiology procedures, and prescribe medications. However, the CHCS does not fully support the military health system’s advances in sharing clinical information across all levels of care.

One of the solutions was to convert to the Theater Medical Information Program-Joint or

TMIP-J, a family of systems designed to aid deployed medical personnel in all levels of care in theater. The system can provide complete clinical care documentation, track medical supplies and equipment, and provide for health surveillance. TMIP-J system is able to adapt and integrate a number of commercial and government off-the-shelf medical systems to support military operations.

In 2011, the TMIP-J and the Composite Health Care System Cache (TC2) team traveled to the Mercy in San Diego to assist the TMIP Maritime Program Office convert the hospital ship to a Theater healthcare documentation platform.

After the platform conversion in San Diego, the team traveled to Baltimore to complete the conversion on the Comfort. The TC2 product team installed and configured the TC2 application while the TMIP Maritime team completed the installation and configuration of AHLTA Theater.

The project involved installing TC2 from the ground up and manually rebuilding all wards, hospital locations, laboratory tests, radiology exams, medication formularies, and interfaces. With the identical layout and capabilities of both ships, the team used the Mercy image to make subtle changes to the configuration to support the minor differences on the Comfort.

As a result of the efforts of the TMIP Maritime teams, most of the patient care documentation performed on these floating military treatment facilities now flows to the Theater Medical Data Store, AHLTA, and to the Clinical Data Repository, then on to the VA.

Since the conversion to the TMIP-J, the Mercy embarked on a Pacific Partnership mission, a four month humanitarian operation to Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The Comfort’s first mission with the TMIP-J has supported operation “Continuing Promise” by visiting a variety of countries in the Caribbean Basin, Central America, and the northern portion of South America.

Source: October 2012 Defense Health Information Management System newsletter “The Beat”.