The Defense Health Agency is expanding its capability for researching and treating eye injuries and vision problems to improve care for service members and veterans.

Recent enhancements to the Defense and Veterans Eye Injury and Vision Registry, known as DVEIVR, are giving doctors and researchers new insights into ocular injuries and outcomes across the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

"DVEIVR transforms data into useful information and, ultimately, practical knowledge that can be applied at the user level for tangible clinical impacts," said Army Colonel Scott McClellan, Defense Health Agency Vision Center of Excellence branch chief in Silver Spring, Maryland.

The registry is a managed clinical health tool overseen by VCE to provide the DOD/VA vision care community and, with appropriate agreements in place, academic eye care professionals with unique clinical ocular and vision-related data.

New Value

Established in 2011 by congressional mandate, newly added components in the registry offer helpful context and supplemental information for doctors and researchers.

"The value of DVEIVR in practice is related to the source of the data, which are medical records," said Dr. David Eliason, deputy chief for the VCE and a practicing ophthalmologist. "It's not just how the eye injury is coded [medically] but it has the doctor's note itself, so it's clinically relevant in that way."

Long-term research may be especially valuable. As the U.S. military conducts fewer combat operations overseas, there are fewer combat injuries, but the VA continues to provide follow-on care for veterans injured years ago, Eliason said.

"I'm very much interested in the long-term disposition of these patients, 10 to 12 years post-injury. The registry data help us to determine who is going to the VA and who doesn't know about VA programs for eye injury follow-on care."