Defense Department leaders are focused on improving medical readiness and access to care in the Military Health System, the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs said.

“The [Defense Health Agency] is a new enterprise, … so we are in [a] growing stage,” Dr. Lester Martinez-Lopez said July 30 during an Association of the U.S. Army Noon Report webinar. “There are a lot of negotiations between the services and Defense Health Agency to make sure that … we're going to deliver the right care to every service member that is wounded or injured.”

A retired Army major general and family medicine physician, Martinez-Lopez was the first Latino to head the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command. He is a graduate of the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine and has a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University.

To ensure that soldiers and other service members get adequate access to care, DoD is working to bring patients back to its military treatment facilities.

“We're going to move to critical MTFs first to reattract patients,” he said. “The places where we have the [most] patients and the active-duty and service members, we're going to put investment in those places first, so we start attracting patients back. As we succeed in that, then we will keep expanding.”

To improve readiness and brain health, DoD also is looking to minimize exposure to blast overpressure, which are shock waves generated by firing heavy weapons such as mortars, rockets and rifles.

“Before … we were not looking at the brain as an organ that was being affected by blast overpressure. … Now we know better,” Martinez-Lopez said. “The department is being proactive and trying to minimize the risk. Our first target on blast overpressure is training. Can we minimize the exposure of blast overpressure in training?”

Military health care needs to “go back to the basics” and build trust among patients, Martinez-Lopez said.

“Health care for me is about taking care of family. Anyone in uniform is family,” he said. “That's the way we need to approach it. This is not a business, so we need to sustain that … family culture. That starts in the military treatment facilities, and that starts in the clinics.”