The strength of the first Army OEM residency was that it was part of a dynamic cycle that consisted of identifying and defining Army OEM needs, training physicians to meet those needs and assigning residency graduates to positions where they would have a positive impact. This paradigm can be used as the basis for contemporary assessments of the Army's need for uniformed OEM physicians and a uniformed OEM residency program.
The lack of an integrated approach to data capture, information management, and analysis limits the contribution of occupational and environmental medicine to protecting 2.3 million uniformed and civilian DoD workers. Despite an abundance of military information systems that include the terms “Safety” and “Occupational Health” in their names, none of these systems provide capabilities needed to aggregate and analyze the results of occupational medicine exams, use medical surveillance to mitigate exposure incidents, provide enterprise-level management of occupational medicine services, or comply with privacy and recordkeeping law and regulation. Instead, they provide a patchwork of data that meets most regulatory compliance requirements but fails to achieve the true objectives of occupational health programs. Bridging these capability gaps will improve the occupational health care of the DoD workforce, improve the quality of occupational medicine services, increase public trust in the DoD management of exposure incidents, and potentially generate hundreds of millions of dollars through cost-avoidance on workers’ compensation claims and through identification and elimination of non–value-added medical certification exams. The ongoing Military Health System transformation represents a unique opportunity to bridge these long-recognized but persistent capability gaps.
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