Behavioral Health Data Portal IT Team winners of the Excellence in Enterprise Information Award

By Army Medicine Public AffairsOctober 21, 2013

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U.S. Army Medical Command's Behavioral Health Data Portal team was notified Oct. 15th that the team & its project had been selected as the Government Awardee for 2013! They are the winners of the Excellence in Enterprise Information Award from the Association For Enterprise Information (AFEI), an affiliate of The National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), a leading Defense Industry association.

"Congratulations! On behalf of AFEI and the Board of Directors, thank you for your Government nomination for the 2013 AFEI Excellence in Enterprise Information Awards Program," the email said. "Your team and project has been selected as the Government Awardee for 2013."

"Each year we receive excellent nominations outlining the team endeavors and the categorized accomplishments; and this year was no different. Your submission, "Behavioral Health Data Portal" was selected for this year. The evaluation panel recognizes your effort and hard work."

"Kudos to the BH IT team!!!" wrote Dave Orman MD, chief, Behavioral Health Service Line Integration Office, . "Well deserved by all concerned for tremendous efforts in design, fielding and training implementation of the Behavioral Health Data Portal (BHDP) under Lt. Col. Mill Brown!"

In 2012, as part of a multi-year effort to build the structures and best practices needed to create a Behavioral Health System of Care, the Behavioral Health Data Portal (BHDP) team, under Lt. Col. Mill Brown's leadership, was organized by the Army Medical Command's Behavioral Health Division to build a user-friendly, web-based Behavioral Health (BH) data application named the Behavioral Health Data Portal. The main intent of the BHDP is to standardize BH clinical data collection during the initial patient intake and at every follow-up appointment -- the 1st fielded system of its kind in the Department of Defense.

BHDP consists of a web-based patient portal where patients logon to the BHDP application on a computer in their BH clinic waiting room prior to each appointment. Once logged in, they answer standard, research-validated questions about items related to their presenting symptoms, their stressors, level of functioning and their prior/current BH care. Patient responses are immediately scored and are simultaneously transmitted to a BHDP Provider Portal on BH providers' office laptops.

Providers securely access their portal from their office to review data just prior to seeing the patient. Since the patient's answers are scored and color-coded based on risk, clinicians can easily identify clinically relevant domains of significant change, or areas of significant concern to augment their therapeutic exchanges with their patients, and is used to guide treatment planning and risk assessment in a standardized, high quality fashion. BHDP also generates a BH provider notes template populated for editing that can be quickly pasted into the patient's Electronic Medical Record by the patient's provider.

About the Award: The Excellence in Enterprise Information awards are made to programs exhibiting best practices in information management along with the application of technology to create information environments that make a difference in organizational performance and mission execution.

The purpose of the Excellence in Enterprise Information Awards program is to recognize and reward achievements on the part of Government and Industry teams in connecting, networking, sharing and securing information both within and among organizations.

These Awards are given to government and industry project teams that, in the eyes of the judges, display excellence, innovation, and are models of best practice in information management/information technology. The awards program is held to foster recognition and awareness of the many superb projects and programs being executed across the spectrum of IM/IT.

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