New Defense-VA record tracks individuals from enlistment to grave

The Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record now under development by the Veterans Affairs and Defense departments will provide active-duty service members and veterans with a seamless benefits system that includes links to burial and memorial systems, VA said in its fiscal 2012 budget narrative released on Monday.

The electronic records will include exchange of burial and memorial information with VA's current memorial affairs operations and its Burial Operational Support System, which the department is in the process of modernizing, budget documents said.

The system will help to automatically determine the eligibility of a veteran for burial benefits, support request for grave markers and provide digital mapping of all headstones and grave markers in the 131 national cemeteries that VA operates.

VA requested a budget of $70 million for VLER, down $13.5 million from the proposed $83.5 million in the 2011 budget still awaiting passage by Congress.

The department's budget documents said VLER will end up not as a new record system but as a means to pull reliable information from a number of existing Defense and VA systems "in the shortest possible time."

VA officials said the connectivity that VLER will provide "has never been accomplished before and will greatly improve access to electronic health, benefits and administrative information for authorized service partners within the federal government and, most importantly, with private sector partners nationwide."

VLER will use the Nationwide Health Information Network to exchange health care information with private health care providers such as Kaiser Permanente, as demonstrated in a pilot project in 2009. Officials said they plan to continue these pilots in 2011 using an additional 10 private health care providers.

VA said VLER also will incorporate information exchanged with the Social Security Administration and Defense to ensure delivery of a full package of benefits to injured and severely ill service members.

Defense and Veterans Affairs already share health records on 250,000 patients eligible for treatment in military or VA hospitals and clinics. VA has promised this year to allow its doctors to view clinical notes on these patients from the Defense AHLTA electronic health record.

Both Defense and VA, the budget narrative said, have agreed that the objective of VLER is to provide a seamless record from time of enlistment to burial, when "the last benefit is administered."