An official website of the United States government
A .mil website belongs to an official U.S. Department of Defense organization in the United States.
A lock (lock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .mil website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

MiCare system improves health care

  • Published
  • By Col. Michelle D. Lavey
  • 375th Medical Operations Squadron commander
The 375th Medical Group is always looking for ways to keep the care we provide safe, effective, and efficient. We recently fielded a new process that will support these important objectives. This process involves combining MiCare, a secure messaging system, with an innovation that will improve the speed and accuracy of our patient check-in process.

MiCare is a system that allows all uniformed services, active duty, reserve, retired, and their dependents to sign into a secure website, ask questions of your medical team, request routine appointments, inquire about the status of referrals, and request the results of laboratory or radiology studies. Nearly all transactions that you currently do by telephone can be done on MiCare with two exceptions.

First, it is important to emphasize that MiCare is for routine transactions only and is not a replacement for 911 during an emergency. Second, MiCare is not appropriate for urgent care issues. All messages are answered within three business days.

Signing up for MiCare is a painless process that can only be accomplished face-to-face at the Medical Group. Since MiCare is a means of transmitting private information about your health, you can only get access to the system by verifying your contact email address in person. This does not require an appointment and takes less than two minutes. Just stop by any of our customer intake areas (check-in desk for any of the clinics, lab, radiology, physical therapy, the pharmacy, etc.) and we will be happy to sign you up for the service.

One important item that enables us to provide you with safe and effective care is ensuring the accuracy of the health information that you provide to us. We must know at every visit if there have been any changes in your health, recent illnesses, surgeries, visits with outside providers, changes in your medications, changes in the health status of your family, etc. This is true if your visits with us are one year apart or two days apart.

As critical as accurate and current information is, we recognize from your feedback that we can improve upon our traditional means of collecting it. As a result, we will use MiCare to provide you with at-home access to your medical screening form, the Tri-Service Work Flow intake sheet. This form can be sent directly to your email in-box.

The TSWF is both fill-able and save-able. The concept is that you will make an electronic copy of this form for each member of your family, complete each form with as much detail as possible, and save the form(s) to your home computer. Then, prior to each visit, you can call up the form and update it, print it, and give it to your medical technician at check-in. A possible variation of this process is that you can attach the updated form to a secure MiCare message and send it to us. Please do not send it to us by email, as it not a secure means of sending protected health information. Your technician can then call up the form you transmitted to us via MiCare message. The process is secure, efficient and will further our efforts to "go green" by preserving our resources and reduce waste.

To get blank copies of the TSWF into the hands of as many people as possible, we recently attached it to a MiCare message that was sent to every person registered in the system who gets their care from the Scott Family Health Clinic. We encourage you to share this form, before you add any information to it, with any other person you know who gets their care at the 375th Medical Group. You can also download a copy of the TSWF from the 375th Medical Group home page at www.scott.af.mil/units/yourmedicalhome.asp as well as our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/#!/ScottAFBClinic.

Please know that we are honored to be your healthcare partners and medical home. We are always open to suggestions and will keep looking for ways to provide you with safe, high quality care in the most efficient manner we can find.

"375th Medical Group . . . Trusted Care, Anywhere."