New TRICARE Deputy Director Takes Over

New Deputy Director Takes the Helm of TRICARE

Bringing ideas and experience aplenty from the West Coast to the nation’s capital, TRICARE’s new deputy director can quickly and easily sum up TRICARE’s importance to America’s uniformed service members, retirees and their families.

“When you join the military you’re promised a comprehensive health care benefit,” said Navy Rear Adm. Christine Hunter, the new deputy director of the TRICARE Management Activity. “We want to ensure it is available in all locations and over all the periods of life.”

Now that she is back in the Washington, D.C., area, Hunter said she’s ready to get to work delivering on the promise of TRICARE and improving beneficiaries’ health and overall satisfaction. She is also excited to take over the helm of TRICARE and face the challenges of her new assignment. To that end, Hunter doesn’t see providing health care to 9.4 million people as a challenge to be surmounted; she sees it as an opportunity for innovation.

“We have the chance to set the standard and lead the nation in comprehensive, high-quality health care with universal access,” Hunter said. “We can showcase our successes and learn from others.”

One of the many possibilities Hunter would like to explore to improve the TRICARE experience is the “medical home” concept, emphasizing four primary health care pillars: accessibility, continuity, coordination and comprehensiveness. Medical home would give TRICARE beneficiaries an enhanced relationship with their providers, ensuring access, continuity, preventive care delivery and disease management. “To implement this concept in our military treatment facilities,” Hunter explained, “we’ll need to provide the right mix of both military and civilian providers and support staff.”

In a patient centered medical home, health care providers and patients work together to set attainable goals and manage the patient’s overall health. “If I’m your doctor, and you and I develop a partnership,” Hunter said, “you are far more likely to accept my advice to stop smoking, get a mammogram, or have a screening colonoscopy.”

With more than 30 years as a physician, Hunter speaks with authority about the importance of the patient-provider relationship. “I treasure what I call the ‘sacred space’ between physician and patient,” Hunter said. “We are allowed incredible access to an individual in some of life’s most private moments.”

These moments – of happiness and joy, grief and sadness, confusion and indecision – are the times when a physician can have the greatest impact on a patient or family member’s life, she said.

“We’re invited to help guide them on what can be a journey to rebuilding their lives, restoring hope or walking a difficult pathway that maybe doesn’t end in restored health, but is a journey every family must travel at some time,” Hunter said.

As a Naval officer, Hunter has also served as a leader in the military health system at all levels including hospital commander, fleet surgeon, chief of staff at the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery and most recently, as commander of Navy Medicine West and Naval Medical Center San Diego. As such, she understands the importance of combining good business practices and quality clinical care in military medicine. She is very focused on defining and implementing best business practices with an eye on the future. Consequently, she is a proponent of more wide-spread use of electronic medical records; both within the military health system, and the nation as a whole.

“President Obama has emphasized what an electronic medical record can bring in terms of continuity of health care,” Hunter said. “If your provider has access to longitudinal information about your health and information about health trends, then we can partner together to improve individual and group health.”

“As our nation takes on health care reform in a major way, we in the Military Health System can share our lessons and learn from that debate,” Hunter said. “We can get involved with other national leaders, working together to forge the way ahead.”