Joint Base San Antonio, Texas (Sept. 8, 2016) -- The U.S. Army Physical Therapy community is encouraging providers to include the Medical Readiness Assessment Tool (MRAT) with all first time physical therapy and occupational therapy patient encounters beginning in October 2016.
The MRAT is a cloud-based, electronic screening tool that allows Army clinicians and leaders to maintain Soldier readiness by providing leader insight on unit-level medical risk and enables clinicians to more efficiently provide individual-level readiness assessments to commanders.
Through MRAT leaders can identify medically at-risk Soldiers earlier than previously possible, improve evaluative quality, and enable clinicians to better engage patients.
"Adoption of the MRAT has been slow since the initial release this year but local initiatives have encouraged its use in targeted settings to include Periodic Health Assessments (PHAs) at Fort Benning, Physical Therapy at Fort Jackson, and Nurse Case Managers reviewing patient files for the Integrated Disability Evaluation System (IDES) at Fort Bliss," said Maj. Brett Ketchum, Office of the Surgeon General, G8/9, Innovative Clinical Analytics (ICA) team.
"We are looking forward to increased usage when the Army physical therapy community begins including MRAT with all first time physical therapy and occupational therapy patient encounters," Ketchum added.
MRAT is intended to provide timely assessments and interventions to preserve unit readiness to at-risk Soldiers within the constraints of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and privacy rules.
"The MRAT provides leaders and clinicians a powerful tool for mitigating factors that threaten individual medical readiness," said Ketchum.
In the last year, in-person training has been conducted at 18 installations across the Army for medical providers at the treatment facilities and unit medical providers were trained from May to December 2015. Following Medical Readiness Transformation training, each facilities leadership and clinical staff was given access to MRAT.
Since the Army-wide rollout, the MRAT has been integrated into the existing workflow practices and the tools can be accessed through the Command Management System website, as well as directly through a tab in the PHA and Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application (AHLTA). The Leader Tool is available through a link in the Medical Readiness Transformation's Commander's Dashboard.
According to Ketchum, "The initial limited use has made it difficult to identify benefits from MRAT use, but as use increases, especially in the PT/OT community, we will be better able to identify MRAT use benefits in the medical community and Army readiness."
"In the future, we look to increase MRAT usage by providers across the Army medical community," said Ketchum.
Social Sharing