Today was a meeting of the Joint Preventive Medicine Policy Group (another acronym: JPMPG, pronounced jip-em-pig), which is a group of preventive medicine people from all of the services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, sometimes foreign militaries, etc), and the topic of the meeting was the periodic health assessment.
The periodic health assessment is done by each of the services, but each one is different, which in today's fairly integrated military, makes things a bit difficult. There's an online portion that each service member completes on his/her own time, and then there's a face-to-face with a medical provider (doc, PA, NP, etc). The problem comes in for the face-to-face... if a sailor goes to an Army clinic to do the PHA, there's no guarantee that that Army doc knows how to do a Navy PHA (or even knows which computer program to use). For the record, I don't know how to do Navy or Air Force PHAs, nor do I know what programs they use. As you can figure, that creates some problems on joint bases.
So the purpose of the meeting (which extends into tomorrow, but I won't be going to, because I'll be at WRAIR for didactics), is to figure out 1) what the purpose of the PHA is (that's an entirely different conversation, which I won't get into); 2) if the multiple different PHAs can be standardized into one form; and 3) what that might look like.
Easier said than done. There's a lot more to policy than meets the eye.
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