The mission of the Joint Trauma System (JTS) is to improve trauma readiness and outcomes through evidence-driven performance improvement. The JTS vision is that every Soldier, Sailor, Airman and Marine injured on the battlefield or in any theater of operations will be provided with the optimum chance for survival and maximum potential for functional recovery.
JTS supports US military performance improvement (PI) initiatives and activities by identifying, tracking and making recommendations on efforts to ensure the appropriate evaluation and treatment of injured Service members across the continuum of care, improve medic training and ensure medical readiness.
The DoDTR is the first and only DoD trauma patient registry to collect combat casualty care epidemiology, treatments and outcomes from point of injury to recovery. The DoDTR contains identified information taken from medical records, expert clinical inference, scoring and coding schematics, probability determination and PI data.
As the DoD Center of Excellence for MHS trauma care delivery, JTS directly assists each Combatant Command in trauma system planning, treatment, management, and improvement of casualty outcomes to include battle injuries, disease non-battle injuries and all-hazard settings through evidence-driven performance improvement.
CTS: Combatant Command Trauma System
The JTS Committee of Surgical Combat Casualty Care hosted the first summit to address the needs of Trauma Medical Directors and Trauma Program Managers stateside and abroad. This conference was geared at linking the roles of trauma leaders in the Military Health System to support the readiness mission and its translation into a functioning deployed trauma system in the operational (forward) realm.
Goals:
Read about the challenges facing the CCMDs and the recommendations to address them.
The Joint Trauma System (JTS) is mentoring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nations building combat casualty care programs through the NATO Military Healthcare Working Group (MHCWG). The mission of the MCHWG is "to initiate and develop common principles, policies, doctrines, concepts, procedures, techniques, programs, and initiatives in the military health care field… (and) develop evidence-based NATO military healthcare advice in order to advance clinical policy, develop common professional medical techniques and standards, and ensure continuous quality improvement."
With 28 European and two North American nations, and a successful record of maintaining collective security since 1949, NATO is perhaps the most important strategic partner for the United States. As an alliance of sovereign nations that does not fall under a structure of command and control unless under wartime footing, NATO is a coalition of the willing. JTS has worked with NATO military medical committees in the past, including the Blood Panel. The Blood Panel is working on blood interoperability within the alliance– an essential process with growing impact. JTS has made notable contributions to the program; JTS Chief COL Gurney and JTS Deputy Chief Dr. Mary Ann Spott are key contributors.
The MHCWG is subordinate to the Committee of the Chiefs of Military Medical Services in NATO (COMEDS), which includes Maj Gen Paul Friedrichs, the U.S. Joint Staff Surgeon and supporter of JTS. The MHCWG has several subordinate NATO panels for military medicine, including the Emergency Medicine Panel, the Special Operations Forces Medicine Panel, and the Blood Panel.
This past fall CTS Operations Branch Chief Col Baker attended the 34th meeting of the MHCWG in Aarhus, Denmark. An important agenda item was the adoption of the Tägerwilen 2 Report for advancing pre-hospital care improvement initiative priorities and concurrence to publish as a Standardization Recommendation. The soon-to-be-published report expands on four critical priorities: Tactical Casualty Care, Blood Far Forward, Forward Surgical Capabilities, and Prolonged Casualty Care. In every priority, JTS publications including DeployedMedicine.com and JTS.health.mil were listed as the primary resources to the allied nations for developing their own combat casualty care programs.
"Analysis is only as good as the data."
Good data equals clean data. As the host of the most complete combat casualty care registry available, the Joint Trauma System (JTS) is taking extra steps to guarantee our partners receive the most accurate and meaningful data possible.
The JTS DoD Trauma Registry (DoDTR) captures vital data points along the patient journey and records detailed information of which clinical measures were taken to help our patients. These data points are then used in reports and dashboards to gain insights on patient care and to help devise guidelines to monitor and improve outcomes. The data must be correct and as error-free as possible in order to maximize its value. The data often starts its lifecycle by being manually documented on paper before being entered and abstracted into the registry.
DoDTR data leads to revelations and advancements into trauma care to save more lives. Read the latest research and studies based on DoDTR data. Check out the JTS Publications page.
