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Handheld device to help track medical records

A hand-held device used by Army doctors to track medical information for soldiers on the battlefield will now be used by all the services.

Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker said May 27 that the Medical Communications for Combat Casualty Care, or MC4, will allow all medical personnel to quickly input medical information for all service members in Iraq, Afghanistan, or any other combat deployment.

MC4 first went to the combat zones in 2003. In the past, combat medics have tracked patient care with paper records — sometimes pinning the documents to a patient’s chest. The new system ensures the documents follow the patient all the way back to hospitals in the U.S. or Germany, where doctors on the ground know exactly what to expect when patients land.

Because all the services will now use the device, Army doctors don’t have to worry about Marines coming in with paper documents because the Navy was still using the old system, for example. In Iraq and Afghanistan, military doctors often care for service members from other branches.

So far, there are 24,000 devices in Iraq and 13 other countries, and 26,000 medical personnel have been trained to use them.

Because service members’ medical records had been lost in the past, Congress and President Clinton in 1997 mandated that an electronic medical record system be created.

More information is available online.