AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota Faces are smacked with shrapnel, legs are blasted away near knees, bullets pass through young men’s abdomens. Vehicles roll over, crushing bones. Eardrums rupture. Digits are severed.
Dozens of soldiers die. Hundreds more begin journeys home, sometimes to treatment that will last the rest of their lives.
Each was listed in a small but meticulous computer entry by Colonel Wirt, a doctor intent on documenting how soldiers were wounded or sickened, how they were treated and how they fared. For those seeking to understand war and how best to survive it, the doctor on his own initiative created an evidence-based tool and a possible model.
His database is one part of a vast store of information recorded about the experiences of American combatants. But there are concerns that the potential lessons from such data could be lost, because no one has yet brought the information together and made it fully cohere.
Colonel Wirt was a brigade surgeon from the 101st Airborne Division during the American-led effort in 2010 and 2011 to dislodge the Taliban from their rural stronghold along the Arghandab River. His database was part official record, part personal research project.
His commander required him to keep tabs on ailing and wounded soldiers, and to inform him of their prognosis and whereabouts in the medical system.
To this, Colonel Wirt added layers of information. He documented which weapons caused which wounds. He tried to record increased or decreased risk factors — whether the victim was wearing larger or smaller body armor, whether a bomb-sniffing dog was present, when a tourniquet was applied.
He recorded which accidents and diseases took which soldiers off duty, and for how long. He mapped where on a human body bullets most often struck.
A year after he returned to the states, Colonel Wirt and his database point to the promise and obstacles related to studying more than a decade of American war.
The amassed information on combatants over 10 years amounts to the most detailed data ever assembled on battlefield trauma and its care, American military officers say. But the records are scattered.
The Defense Department’s trauma registry has information on roughly 66,000 patients who were admitted to modern military hospitals, including American and coalition troops, Afghans and Iraqis, contractors, and the odd journalist, diplomat or aid worker. It is a record, largely, of those who survived.
The Armed Forces Medical Examiner’s Office maintains separate sets of records, including full-body CT scans, for service members killed in action. And each patient’s medical records, often with narrative details of wounds and a thorough chronicle of treatments, are available in electronic form, but only to those involved in each person’s care.
Supporting documents for Purple Heart awards can also include medical and tactical data.
In certain contexts, some of the data is merged, as at quarterly meetings of a special committee that has been seeking ways to improve prehospital care.
So far these disparate storehouses of information have not been joined in a permanent place, much less made widely available for cross-disciplinary study.
Col. Jeffrey A. Bailey, a surgeon who directs the Joint Trauma System at the Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston, confirmed what several military doctors noted: There as yet is no standardized medical database that enables researchers to look back comprehensively on the experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Colonel Bailey said his institute, a research arm to promote improvement in medical care, eventually hopes to combine a “K.I.A. module” from the medical examiner with the registry of patients treated in hospitals.
He added, however, that discussion of merging the data is in its early phases, and that while “I think we will get there, I can’t tell you when it will happen.”
Dozens of soldiers die. Hundreds more begin journeys home, sometimes to treatment that will last the rest of their lives.
Each was listed in a small but meticulous computer entry by Colonel Wirt, a doctor intent on documenting how soldiers were wounded or sickened, how they were treated and how they fared. For those seeking to understand war and how best to survive it, the doctor on his own initiative created an evidence-based tool and a possible model.
His database is one part of a vast store of information recorded about the experiences of American combatants. But there are concerns that the potential lessons from such data could be lost, because no one has yet brought the information together and made it fully cohere.
Colonel Wirt was a brigade surgeon from the 101st Airborne Division during the American-led effort in 2010 and 2011 to dislodge the Taliban from their rural stronghold along the Arghandab River. His database was part official record, part personal research project.
His commander required him to keep tabs on ailing and wounded soldiers, and to inform him of their prognosis and whereabouts in the medical system.
To this, Colonel Wirt added layers of information. He documented which weapons caused which wounds. He tried to record increased or decreased risk factors — whether the victim was wearing larger or smaller body armor, whether a bomb-sniffing dog was present, when a tourniquet was applied.
He recorded which accidents and diseases took which soldiers off duty, and for how long. He mapped where on a human body bullets most often struck.
A year after he returned to the states, Colonel Wirt and his database point to the promise and obstacles related to studying more than a decade of American war.
The amassed information on combatants over 10 years amounts to the most detailed data ever assembled on battlefield trauma and its care, American military officers say. But the records are scattered.
The Defense Department’s trauma registry has information on roughly 66,000 patients who were admitted to modern military hospitals, including American and coalition troops, Afghans and Iraqis, contractors, and the odd journalist, diplomat or aid worker. It is a record, largely, of those who survived.
The Armed Forces Medical Examiner’s Office maintains separate sets of records, including full-body CT scans, for service members killed in action. And each patient’s medical records, often with narrative details of wounds and a thorough chronicle of treatments, are available in electronic form, but only to those involved in each person’s care.
Supporting documents for Purple Heart awards can also include medical and tactical data.
In certain contexts, some of the data is merged, as at quarterly meetings of a special committee that has been seeking ways to improve prehospital care.
So far these disparate storehouses of information have not been joined in a permanent place, much less made widely available for cross-disciplinary study.
Col. Jeffrey A. Bailey, a surgeon who directs the Joint Trauma System at the Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston, confirmed what several military doctors noted: There as yet is no standardized medical database that enables researchers to look back comprehensively on the experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Colonel Bailey said his institute, a research arm to promote improvement in medical care, eventually hopes to combine a “K.I.A. module” from the medical examiner with the registry of patients treated in hospitals.
He added, however, that discussion of merging the data is in its early phases, and that while “I think we will get there, I can’t tell you when it will happen.”
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