The Ministry of Defence is to create an electronic health record for all 200,000 UK military personnel.

The scheme has parallels with the £2.3bn NHS National Programme's plans for civilian health records, says Colonel Mike Manson, medical information manager in the Defence Medical Services department.

'The programme is very firmly wedded to what the NHS is doing because they provide virtually all our secondary care. We've got to fit in with them and will not go forward unless we can demonstrate that we can exchange information with NHS systems,' he said.

The Defence Medical Information Capability Programme (DMICP) health record application will be rolled out in parallel with the £5bn Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) project currently in procurement.

DII will create a single infrastructure accessible from permanent military sites as well as battlefield environments, ships and submarines.

Using DII, the DMICP centrally-stored health records will be accessible by authorised personnel wherever they are needed.

'When the soldier appears, rather than needing a paper record, the doctor will simply type the patient's number into the computer system and will call up their records from a central database. The database will hold health information about all 200,000 military personnel,' said Manson.

The information will also be useful for management purposes.

'Personal identifying information will be stripped out and then we can look at the overall health of groups of people in forces and use that to raise standards of fitness and health in the military,' said Manson.

The system is due to be up and running by December 2005.

'The current plan is that for the five years after that we will build more capability into it - improving links into other defence IT systems, such as human resources, and into the NHS,' said Manson.

Four companies have been shortlisted for the DMICP deal - LogicaCMG, IBM, Lockheed Martin and Schlumberger.

The Ministry of Defence will choose two suppliers in January for the next phase of the multi-million pound procurement, which will involve building demonstration versions of the proposed solutions.