The Defense Health Agency (DHA) is a joint, integrated agency with a global workforce of almost 130,000 civilians and military personnel committed to medical excellence, healthcare improvement, and ensuring Army, Navy, and Air Force military personnel are ready to perform combat operations and humanitarian missions at home and abroad in both peacetime and wartime. As part of its mission, the DHA manages the Military Health System (MHS), which provides health services to approximately 9.6 million uniformed service members, military retirees, and family members. The MHS is also responsible for modernizing and enhancing the MHS Information Platform (MIP) by creating a more robust, resilient, and innovative health information system. The Defense Healthcare Management System (DHMS) was chartered to transform healthcare delivery and advance data sharing through a modernized electronic health record for service members, veterans, and their families. The mission of the Enterprise Intelligence and Data Solutions (EIDS) program as part of DHMS is to support the strategic goals of the MHS and facilitate informed decision-making through the delivery of robust information services and data in a timely, relevant, and actionable manner. The Naval Information Warfare Center Atlantic (NIWC) is home to the DoD’s top scientists, engineers, and technicians in the information warfare battlespace. It is forward-based, forward-deployed, and globally positioned to drive innovation and warfighter information advantage. In partnership with NIWC, TIAG supports EIDS, leveraging cutting-edge technology and expertise to enhance data-driven solutions and streamline processes critical to mission success. Together, we ensure robust, secure, and innovative capabilities for the warfighter.

EIDS, a leader in centralized secondary data management and seamless data services for DHMS, faced a critical data analytics challenge. Their system for processing System Authorization Access Requests (SAARs) was experiencing extensive delays, taking over two months to complete each request. This inefficiency created a substantial backlog, preventing authorized users—including industry partners, DHA, NIWC, and military and government members—from accessing crucial technical assets via the MIP, MHS GENESIS. As a result, this bottleneck jeopardized all projects within the FY21 scope of work, threatening the mission’s success. Despite advanced capabilities, EIDS struggled to process and manage SAAR documents efficiently. The lack of an effective structure to shepherd these documents through the approval process was a significant data analytics problem, impacting the ability of employees and contractors to accomplish work supporting the mission.

To address the significant backlog and inefficiencies in processing System Authorization Access Requests (SAARs) for the DHMS, NIWC contracted TIAG to develop a comprehensive solution for EIDS. This partnership aimed to streamline the SAAR processing workflow, ensure timely access to necessary technical assets, and enhance overall project performance within the Military Health System’s Information Portal.

• Roadmap Creating + Backlog Clearance. TIAG began by providing personnel and technological support to DHA and NIWC, targeting the immediate clearance of the SAAR backlog. Team members were deployed to move SAAR efficiently requests through each milestone, ensuring the backlog was addressed promptly.
• eSAAR Application Development. TIAG collaborated closely with industry partners and stakeholders to identify the requirements for a minimum viable product (MVP) for a new eSAAR application. This phase involved conducting comprehensive requirement-gathering sessions to understand user needs and system specifications and ensuring the safe processing of requesters’ information throughout the system.
• Security and Performance Enhancements. Identified and mitigated security risks to ensure robust data protection and implemented stakeholder-approved and customer-preferred optimization tasks to enhance the system’s performance and usability. Building on the initial success of the MVP, TIAG introduced several critical features to the eSAAR application: digital signature functionality, SAAR dashboard, integrated Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) groups, and RBAC data mart.
• Ongoing Development and Optimization. After successfully implementing the MVP and introducing new functionalities, TIAG continued to refine and develop the eSAAR application, with continuous security and optimization efforts to maintain system integrity and performance and the latest development efforts to modify and enhance the SAAR processing workflow, aligning with evolving user needs and technological advancements.

The new eSAAR application developed by TIAG reduced the average time to complete new MIP requests by more than 75% and significantly enhanced the SAAR processing workflow. TIAG addressed the existing SAAR backlog, processed all pending requests, and implemented a new training program for Facility Security Officers and Government Supervisors, cutting review time by 50%. These efforts received consistent verbal praise and appreciation from stakeholders, highlighting the positive impact of TIAG’s solutions.

The Regional Health Command Atlantic (RHC-A) is a prominent entity within the U.S. military healthcare system, responsible for overseeing healthcare delivery across numerous Military Treatment Facilities (MTFs). RHC-A is dedicated to providing comprehensive and high-quality medical services to military personnel, veterans, and their families.

Looking to improve data management and analysis, the Regional Health Command Atlantic (RHC-A) sought a secure solution that would enhance operational efficiency and facilitate comprehensive access and retrieval of clinical data across the complete spectrum of care for all 19 Military Treatment Facilities (MTFs) to aid in decision-making, resource allocation, more effective and equitable patient-centered care, and assist in the analysis of the health of populations. RHC-A experienced multiple challenges, which included:

• Data management inefficiencies: The extensive process of gathering and analyzing data took up to 30 days, rendering the data outdated and ineffective. Furthermore, technical limitations caused frequent crashes and delays, affecting overall operational efficiency.
• Siloed data: With the MTFs working independently and managing their own data analytics, the valuable cross-sectional of clinical data from a strategy, collection, validation, and activation standpoint wasn’t effectively leveraged across facilities, impacting strategic decision-making.
• Lack of a centralized repository: Without a centralized data repository, RHC-A struggled with instantiating data-driven methodologies, improving collaboration between facilities, and optimizing individual and population health by giving providers seamless access to clinical information across organizational, regional, and national boundaries.

To address these challenges, RHC-A contracted TIAG for data science and business intelligence solutions. TIAG was tasked with creating a faster, more efficient way to extract and analyze the data, while also ensuring it was meaningful and easily understandable across the enterprise. The solution needed to distill extensive MTF-specific metrics into a user-friendly model that produced accurate insights and could be easily adjusted as needed. TIAG tackled RHC-A’s data management challenges by employing innovative strategies, methodologies, and techniques. These include:

• Creating a Centralized Repository: Collaborating with the 19 MTFs, we created a centralized data registry to import extensive clinical data (patient, appointment, encounter, lab, pharmacy, provider, historical procedure, immunization files, and more) from numerous electronic health record systems like AHLTA and other clinical repositories across the MHS and DHA. 
• Advanced Data Visualization: We categorized the 187 unique regional patient safety, care standards, and performance metrics used across the RHC-A enterprise and then designed interactive dashboards to give command staff and medical professionals cross-sectional access and tangible, real-time data in an appealing and easy-to-understand way – creating improved efficiency, insights, and effectiveness in the management of military health data. Command staff can quickly grasp patterns, trends, and relationships within the data and filter, view, and analyze critical metrics in real-time. This empowers them to measure progress, identify risks and opportunities, and swiftly track goals.
• Streamlined Data Processing: The implementation of TIAG’s rapid data processing system revolutionized data analysis, reducing the time for data export and analysis from a month to just 30 minutes. This breakthrough ensures that relevant and up-to-date data is readily available for decision-making, enabling RHC-A to access real-time insights that greatly improve decision-making and operational efficiency.

The secure, interactive solution created by TIAG transformed the way RHC-A gathered and analyzed data; enabling instant insights, improved resource allocation, and seamless collaboration. Additionally, our solution:

• Increased data processing speeds by nearly 100%, leading to quicker response times to emerging events or incidents in medical and logistical domains.
• Significantly improved operational efficiency, resource management, and overall patient care.
• Enhanced services and support for over 600,000 users across the 19 MTFs.

With powerful, intuitive, and interactive dashboards, RHC-A now benefits from rapid, accurate data analysis that allows for strategic decision-making and more effective resource optimization across the enterprise.

AAG provides system configuration, analytical services, innovative applications, and data integration across the U.S. Army’s senior leadership enterprise. AAG’s problem-solving capabilities involve massive enterprise data integration and analysis coupled with the most advanced Information Technology solutions available. 

AAG’s Person-Event Data Environment (PDE) contains sensitive manpower, training, financial, health, and medical records covering U.S. Army personnel, civilian contractors, and military dependents. AAG needed big data management and data analytics expertise to support key research projects across the DoD.

TIAG provided expertise in big data management and data analytics, ensuring DoD leaders and researchers had access to a trove of information that delivered meaningful insights with speed and accuracy. We accumulated, transferred, and accessed controlled personnel, financial, and logistic related data for DoD research studies and projects and conducted data acquisition and transformations to ensure the data were fit for use. We also provided a data dictionary for each transformed data set and delivered automated scripts used for data transformation. 

By delivering ongoing, high-quality data management and Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) support services for a DoD-wide big data solution, we were able to complete hundreds of AAG projects, including research studies, surveys and leadership dashboards. By applying our expertise in developing algorithms that reveal meaningful, effective data patterns, we created a machine learning solution for AAG to analyze large amounts of data and produce informed predictions, reducing man hours in a very complex task related to national security.

The mission of the RHC-A and its more than 17,000 staff members is to provide world-class, proactive and patient-centered health care for approximately 600,000 service members, retirees, and their families.

RHC-A needed a solution to integrate its data repository of 187 unique metrics across business, quality, and performance data into a model that could show MTF commanders the five most important metrics to them by functional area.

There was no single view of the siloed data and RHC-A needed a solution with a comparative view over time for forecasted and actual metrics. To provide meaningful data with methodology and rationale, we created a data repository for their 187 unique metrics, and categorized them so that RHC-A could view the top five metrics most important to each functional area. The data was too substantial (100+ GB) to fit into an Excel spreadsheet and caused continual crashes and stalls, so we created a dashboard where commanders could get a comparative view over time for forecasted and actual metrics. TIAG’s team calculated new metrics to quantify variability, financial impact, and ability to change within each installation. Our solution guarantees reproducibility for each analysis and RHC-A is able to innovate and leverage more data than ever before and optimize resources to further mission accomplishments.

By building an interactive dashboard to enable user-driven exploration of the data, we empowered each MTF commander with clear insights around key mission areas important to their facility. The time to complete analysis is now a matter of minutes for repeat analysis and report generation, including an updated dashboard for more than 30 simultaneous users.

As the U.S. Army’s medical materiel developer, USAMRMC is responsible for medical research, development, acquisition, and medical logistics management. Medical information and products developed by USAMRMC protect and sustain the health and safety of the warfighter through deployment and combat, particularly on the battlefield.

USAMRMC’s organizations developed processes and technology on an individual program basis, limiting their ability to communicate and share information across the entire command. A new information management capability was needed to meet the evolving needs of medical research and product development, requiring a comprehensive analysis of command and business transformation efforts.

TIAG developed a knowledge platform with a comprehensive view of the command’s functional areas within each organization, illuminating individual command group requirements, best practice processes, pain points, and inefficiencies. By applying data analytics to the Research Management Enterprise Capability (RMEC) financial execution requirements, we were able to deliver a dashboard with views ranging from the enterprise level to individual organizations as well as bring in contextual data to clarify the underlying cause of execution performance.

By fusing data analytics and optimization with process reengineering, we were able to ensure the accuracy and integrity of USAMRMC’s business intelligence and financial data, provide a model for leadership transparency in the financial execution of the R&D program and allow visibility into how all components and programs function at all levels of the organization. With direct access to critical information, leadership is now able to spend less time in spreadsheets to ensure target financial spending.