MHSRS 2024: Medical Assessment and Readiness System (MARS)

Video by John Benedetto

Defense Health Agency

Aug. 26, 2024 | 2:52

The Military Health Research Symposium honors the Medical Assessment and Readiness System (MARS) Team, based at Womack Army Medical Center for their outstanding contribution to military medical research.

The Medical Assessment and Readiness System (MARS) became fully functional at Womack Army Medical Center (WAMC), Fort Liberty, NC in January 2020. The original database was created by the Army Office of the Surgeon General (OTSG) in 2011 at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine. Its primary purpose was to provide medical readiness data in the form of the Medical Readiness Assessment Tool (MRAT), which later became embedded into the Army’s Medical Operational Data System to allow providers and commanders to see a soldier’s medical readiness to deploy. It thus became the first predictive analytics solution to service member medical readiness forecasting. In 2016, subsequent OTSG personnel assigned to maintain the MRAT program were not well-positioned to conduct the requisite clinical research activity needed to validate and enhance the system. This began a 4-year process of regulatory approvals for WAMC to acquire this database with the support of our partner, The Consortium for Health and Military Performance (CHAMP) of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD. MARS is now a repository continually updated to capture longitudinal sociodemographic, clinical, and administrative statuses. It has two fully dedicated research servers, full system access clearance for our database managers and data scientists, complete Institutional Review Board and HIPAA approval, and fully executed data sharing agreements with the Defense Health Agency and other Department of Defense (DoD) organizations. MARS includes data on over three million active-duty service members. The longitudinal datasets permit retrospective observation of health and military career trajectories for over 15 million person-years of active service. Over 100 variables are available for analyses to include demographic and anthropomorphic data, body composition and vital signs, diagnostic and procedure codes from direct and purchased care, complete health record data to include laboratory and imaging results, deployment history, military occupational specialty, unit assignment, promotion history, medical profile data, and standard testing such as physical fitness and weapons qualification scores.