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October 27, 2026 · 26 min read

Twenty-four veterans at the Martinsburg VA Medical Center died in 2022 and 2023 with a community care consult still unscheduled, and the chief of community care emailed their names to her team. This issue follows one referral from that hospital through the seven steps it travels between VA and the private doctor at the other end, finds the one date VA cannot produce, explains why six scheduling fixes since 2000 each repaired a single step, and sets out four things, each with an owner, that would give the trip a clock.

October 23, 2026 · 23 min read

Part 4 of a series on DHA's FY27 campaign plan, one line of effort at a time. It is two in the morning at Eglin Air Force Base and a child has a fever. The parent has at least six ways into military medicine and no single place to start. DHA's FY27 campaign plan promises 90 percent patient satisfaction by 2028 and dates fourteen tasks that add or rebuild a way in. This issue follows that one call through the doors, the rule the plan writes for sending patients out to the civilian network, the single door DHA is designing outside the plan, and the five dated steps that would get from six doors to one with what DHA already owns.

October 20, 2026 · 22 min read

Part 3 of a series on DHA's FY27 campaign plan, one line of effort at a time. DHA's FY27 campaign plan promises that 90 percent of the blood the Joint Force will need is positioned forward by 2028, and the first deadline on that promise belongs to a Navy hospital on Guam at the end of this month. The budget that funds it says what is short, and the word it chose was understaffing. This issue follows Line of Effort 3 through the blood supply: the demand a long evacuation creates, the people and agreements the plan needs to meet it, the rules the clock runs under, and the fixes that would show whether the promise is landing.

October 16, 2026 · 21 min read

Part 2 of a series on DHA's FY27 campaign plan, one line of effort at a time. DHA's FY27 campaign plan asks its largest hospitals to take on harder cases so uniformed clinicians stay ready for war. Those same hospitals have to keep running when the clinicians deploy. This issue follows Line of Effort 2 through the budget, the job postings, and the hiring rules that decide who is left in the building, and ends with fixes that work whichever way the staffing debate breaks.

October 13, 2026 · 23 min read

Part 1 of a series on DHA's FY27 campaign plan, one line of effort at a time. DHA's FY27 campaign plan promises to cut the days service members lose to injury beyond normal healing time, and the first condition on its priority list is ACL surgery. Sgt. Wang Geun Lee lost ten months to a torn ACL, and about four of them came before his operation. This issue follows Line of Effort 1 through the new duration standard, the virtual care meant to shorten the wait, the evidence on both sides, and the fixes that would make the number mean what it says.

October 2, 2026 · 19 min read

Fiscal 2027 opened Thursday on a stopgap that runs to December 11. Read the Director's four lines of effort beside the Military Health System's own budget justification and the plan for the year is clear: bring complex care back inside military hospitals, move active duty patients through faster, and staff the hospitals to carry the load. The pieces for success are already on the page. Here is how recapture works in 2027, the date each piece becomes visible, and what every reader can do to help it land.

September 29, 2026 · 23 min read

In May 2012 VA's Inspector General walked the sixth floor of the Winston-Salem regional office and found 37,000 veterans' claims folders stacked on top of the file cabinets, the floor bowing under them. That fiscal year the average claim took 378 days. Last Tuesday VA reported three million claims completed this year at an average of about 76. The folder on that floor and the number in that release are the same object thirteen years apart, and what happened in between was built from parts any agency can buy, in an order the Department of War, Social Security, and the military disability system can copy.

September 25, 2026 · 29 min read

On September 15, in the telehealth and patient portal session of the Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization office's annual summit, a participant asked what the two departments are doing about DoD Instruction 6040.48, the 2018 policy that says the Military Health System will give every beneficiary a personal health record the patient controls. The panel answered that the portal is a different thing. The same session then called the portal a digital front door, a phrase DoW used in its own 2024 solicitation for one. This issue reads the instruction that says which of those is true, follows what the departments built and unbuilt in the eight years since, and ends with the two people the portal serves least: a sergeant who leaves in November and a fifteen-year-old who cannot log in at all.

September 15, 2026 · 19 min read

Executive Order 14426 gives the Department of War 30 days to send every separating service member's records to VA the moment they leave, to fix a delay the White House puts at 90 to 180 days and sources to nothing. The record breaks in three places the order never names: where it is written, how it is certified, and whether the rater can open it. Each has a fix with a number attached, and the contract review due January 6 is where the three lines could go.

September 11, 2026 · 23 min read

Vice Adm. Darin Via's line that data is the Defense Health Agency's North Star got loose this week. The strategy underneath it is eight pages, signed in March, with the right principles and no dates. Each of its five lines of effort has been built somewhere with a number on the page, and the places where the same work failed are on the record too. This issue walks each line against both, and ends at the scorecard DHA has been publishing for a year without calling it one.

September 4, 2026 · 25 min read

This week Matt Clark told his LinkedIn network he had accepted the job of Assistant Director for Research, Development, and Acquisition at the Defense Health Agency, and with it the title of Component Acquisition Executive, effective at the end of the month. In March 2019 he published, in Army acquisition media, the fiscal year in which a naloxone auto-injector still in prototype would clear the FDA. It cleared in that fiscal year. As of this week dha.mil still lists the seat as acting, and the buying machinery around it was rebuilt this spring.

2026-09-03