A Question From the Floor ★ Premium
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.