Defense Health Agency (DHA) Director Army Lt. Gen. Ronald Place visited Naval Station Norfolk to discuss the transformation within the Military Health System (MHS) Feb. 7.

Continuum of Resources and Education (CORE) of Hampton Roads hosted the town hall in which Place met with Soldiers, Airmen, Sailors, their families and civilians to ensure that facilities will keep the medical mission running efficiently every day.

"What I'm looking for is quality and access," Place said. "We have to be able to do that in a way that makes sense financially. What I'm looking for is how do we optimize the quality of care that we deliver, whether we deliver it inside the institutions; the other responsibility is to manage the TRICARE network, and the interaction between our facilities and what exists in that network."

Place oversees all aspects of military medicine in his role as the DHA director, which includes the readiness and training of medical Soldiers, Airmen and Sailors, to ensure a ready medical force for warfighters, their families and veterans. He leads a joint, integrated combat support agency enabling the Army, Navy, and Air Force medical services to provide a medically ready force and ready medical force to combatant commands in both peacetime and wartime.

"Readiness... we talk about it a lot," Place said. "Our job is to bridge that gap between awareness and understanding what readiness really means. Readiness means ensuring our medical personnel stay at the top of their game. Readiness means ensuring personnel are ready for what they need to do here at the American standard of care, in American facilities, and the standard that our military expects us to deliver in the operational environment, as well as the platform responsibilities of our hospitals to deliver on that maintenance of skills; cognitive and technical."

On Oct. 1, 2019, all military medical treatment facilities throughout the U.S. and across all branches of the military were joined under DHA. This milestone was put into motion by the Defense Authorization Act of 2017.

"DHA is about having a system to better deliver readiness, deliver quality and to better deliver to our families," Place said. "My responsibility is to make sure the quality and the access of healthcare delivered must still be the same; high quality American healthcare with the same access to care responsibilities you would expect from us inside of our facilities."

DHA supports the delivery of integrated, affordable, and high-quality health services for 9.5 million active duty service members, retirees, reservists and guardsmen, and their families at military hospitals and clinics or through the TRICARE network.

As the U.S. Navy's oldest continuously operating military hospital since 1830, Naval Medical Center Portsmouth proudly serves past and present military members and their families. The nationally-acclaimed, state-of-the-art medical center, along with the area's 10 branch health and TRICARE Prime Clinics, provide care for the Hampton Roads area. The medical center also supports premier research and teaching programs designed to prepare new doctors, nurses and hospital corpsman for future roles in healing and wellness.

Click here to view the town hall meeting.

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