From episodic care to continuous readiness: Reshaping military healthcare

Military readiness depends on more than physical training and tactical gear. Defense health organizations play a critical role in proactively protecting service members before injury or illness. For many years, however, military medicine has functioned largely as episodic intervention — treating personnel only after acute issues compromise their fitness for duty.

Kristin Gowers, vice president of business development at Maximus, is leading a charge to modernize that reactive cycle. She recently spoke to GovExec TV about the critical links between enhancing data-informed decision-making, implementing emerging technologies, and improving defense readiness and overall health for both active duty service members and veterans.

“We’re trying to shift to a more continuous treatment model where we’re continuously monitoring,” Gowers said. “We’re making sure that if anybody’s at risk, we’re proactively reaching out to help them stay deployable and able to do their jobs.”

Predictive analytics support early intervention

Achieving proactive intervention will require transforming how agencies manage vast, fragmented streams of health records accumulated across duty stations and deployments. “Being able to bring all of that together into a single longitudinal record is going to be one of the key elements,” Gowers said. 

Success is not just about simply gathering the data into dashboards but transforming it. Incorporating predictive analytics will enable health organizations to identify someone as being at risk before they need intervention.

“We have a lot of data everywhere right now,” Gowers said. “But unless somebody acts on it, unless there is a referral in the system for care, unless somebody’s following up, it doesn’t mean we’re using the data to the best of our ability.”

Predictive analytics can identify subtle patterns in patient data before they turn into clinical crises, and artificial intelligence can help surface these anomalies across massive data sets far faster than manual review. This technology must support, not replace, human clinical judgment. Strong cybersecurity, regulatory compliance and human oversight remain critical.

Impactful results will not be driven by algorithms alone. The true value comes “after we identify somebody at risk, and making sure the right person is looking at the at-risk list to make sure they don’t become non-deployable and we’re acting on that information,” Gowers explained. 

Breaking down institutional barriers

Long-time siloes between the Defense Health Agency (DHA) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) also create hurdles to seamless healthcare. As active-duty service members transition to veterans, the milestone should not be treated as a handoff between DHA and VA but instead should prioritize continuity of care.

“It should just be a healthcare journey, regardless of who is holding that person’s hand throughout,” Gowers said. “Before a service member transitions to being a veteran, we’re actually looking proactively at what they need so they know who to contact, where to go and they have a smooth transition throughout their health care journey.”

By establishing proactive coordination of this significant transition during the active duty phase, before the separation paperwork is signed, fewer veterans will be vulnerable to falling through the cracks of bureaucratic silos.

 Measuring success: Outcomes over volume

The shift toward more proactive, continuous care will also require updating traditional performance metrics. Defense health organizations have typically equated success with throughput, tracking appointment volume and patient traffic as measures of a productive system.

By focusing on outcomes as indicators of readiness success, agency leaders will be able to evaluate whether care is truly resolving medical problems. Fewer clinical visits are not necessarily symptoms of lowered productivity but can mean issues are being solved faster. Fewer visits also enhance patient experience and increase capacity across healthcare institutions.

“Is the person actually getting better? Is what we’re doing working?” Gowers said. “Throughput used to always tell us, ‘Is the system moving?’ Now we want to see if the system is working the way we need it to make sure the service member, the veteran, has the best healthcare possible.”

Learn more about how Maximus is helping defense health agencies transform traditional models of care.