Armed forces personnel will be able to access electronic health and dental records from any Ministry of Defence (MoD) medical centre in the world by 2008.

The MoD Defence Medical Services (DMS) department has signed an £80m deal with supplier LogicaCMG to develop the system to replace a mixture of paper and electronic records. It will be piloted in a small number of peace-time sites from the end of this year.

The Defence Medical Information Capability Programme (DmicP) is intended to improve access to health records and better monitor treatment, says MoD DMS assistant director of medical information management Mike Manson.

‘We are a very mobile organisation; people get posted around the world and moved around for training, and currently complete records are only available in the parent medical centre,’ he said.

‘With DmicP there will be a central database and any medical centre will be able to call up the record for anyone.’

Once up and running at permanent peace-time sites, DmicP will be rolled out to mobile locations such as ships and deployed into operations by 2008. Field hospital clinicians dealing with battle wounded will have access to a complete medical history and be able to upload treatment details directly onto a central database via radio links.

Information will also be put onto a ruggedised chip attached to the patient’s dogtags to guarantee that clinicians at every stage in the evacuation chain have access to the patient’s complete medical history.

The DmicP system is being built using software from GP application supplier Emis. From 2010 it will interface with the national data ‘spine’ being developed under the £6bn National Programme for NHS IT.

DMS has consulted widely to ensure the plan meets users’ needs, says Manson.

DmicP was originally scheduled to be live by 2005 but was delayed to ensure prospective plans would work on the MoD’s existing network infrastructure as we ll as the capability due to be delivered under the Defence Information Infrastructure Future programme.

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