For the Record

One of the biggest determining factors to how your life in the military will pan out is your spouse's job/community. Pilot families stick together, submarine families stick together, etc. The job determines your duty station and therefore what base you are attached to. My husband is in the Information Warfare (IW) community. Due to the size and scope of their work, IW officers can be sent anywhere and, so far, we have not had to be attached to any particular base. This means we've had lots of options when it comes to housing, schools, medical care, etc. Health care being such an important issue these days, I wanted to address one very specific issue I recently had to deal with: transfer of medical records upon change of duty station.

If your family lives on or close to a base you usually will be treated at the medical treatment facility (MTF) on base. I assume your records follow you to the next duty station. Our case is different since we were able to enroll in a special Johns Hopkins medical coverage (a Tricare plan though) that allows us to see JH doctors and have more options with regards to specialists and hospitals. Before this plan we had Tricare remote which is similar in nature, just not attached to a particular health care system like Hopkins. We got to pick a primary care physician (PCP) that accepted Tricare and could pick out a specialist, get a referral and be treated without problems. Military families are lucky when it comes to our healthcare and insurance options. But alas, I found a small hiccup in this system if your records are not put all together in a nice military file.

When transfering from one staion to the next, be sure to review your records, gather all important medical history and documents and be sure they travel with you. When we first arrived in MD from TX I took the kids for their annual check ups and had their vaccination records transferred so I could show my son's pre-school he was up to date. This was a year and a half ago. Last month the school's director noticed my son was missing some very important shots, MMR (mumps, measles and rubella) and Varicella (chicken pox). I thought it was just a clerical error because I was sure at his last wellness check up his records were reviewed. I called his pediatrician's office, the nurse looked over their records, and she verified he had not had those shots. I made the appointment to bring him in ASAP. Just as a precaution I looked on the CDC (Center for Disease Contorl) website to go over vaccination schedules since I've heard so much about  the link between current schedules and autism. In my search I noticed my son was supposed to have had a MMR and Varicella shot before the age of 2. I was perplexed. I am diligent about keeping up with doctor and dental appointments so how did I miss this? I decided to call my son's first pediatrician who's offices are located in Austin, our previous duty station (my husband did the STA-21 program at UT-Austin). The nurse who answered the call was incredibly gracious and handled my request immediately. She verified that my son had, in fact, received his shots a few weeks after he turned one! I was floored. The nurse kindly faxed over the records to our doc here and I called the office to cancel the appointment for the shots. I was very concerned that our doc's office did such a poor job transfering his vaccination records and almost gave him a double dose of inocculations. I'm not a doctor and have no idea about the potential side effects of such an act, but I was disturbed by the posibilities. What if I was not a vigilant parent with a little extra time on my hands to go through that process? What would've been the outcome? I'm glad I did not have to find out.

Military families move around A LOT and our familiy's medical history is just one of the many things we have to juggle every time that moving van pulls up to our homes. If you are ever in doubt about a medical question, whether you receive treatment at MTF's or not, you should trust yourself enough to follow through on that feeling.