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Are you medically ready to deploy?

  • Published
  • By Col. Judi Hughes and Capt. Stephanie White
  • 628th Medical Group
JOINT BASE CHARLESTON, S.C. --  It's late on a Friday night and you get a call from your Unit Deployment Manager stating your Unit Type Code has been tasked to deploy on short notice. Are you ready?

Luckily for your unit, you are one of those hard-charging Airmen and you have kept everything up to date and are ready to go! However, that is not the case across all units as 21 percent of our Joint Base Charleston Airmen are not medically ready to step on a plane today.

Every Airman is responsible to maintain their Individual Medical Readiness. It is a key component of force health protection and war fighting readiness. The purpose of the IMR program is to provide commanders, military department leaders and Primary Care Managers the ability to monitor the medical readiness status of their personnel, ensuring a healthy and fit fighting force is medically ready to deploy in accordance with Department of Defense Instruction 6025 dated Jan. 19, 2006.

How do you know if you are ready to deploy? You can view your IMR two different ways:
1. The AF Portal: to AF Portal Featured Links, to Deployment & Readiness, to Medical Readiness-Deployment Health. This takes you directly into your MyIMR page in the Aeromedical Services Information Management System web application; or
2. Directly from the web at https://asims.afms.mil/imr/MyIMR.aspx.

There are six key elements that encompass a person's medical readiness status.
1) Periodic Health Assessment
2) No Deployment Limiting Conditions
3) Dental Readiness
4) Immunization Status
5) Medical Readiness Laboratory Tests
6) Individual Medical Equipment

Each item above is assigned a color based on the status of the requirement. Any item which is current appears in green. Items that are due appear in yellow but once completed will revert to green. Overdue items are those that have exceeded their due date and are now showing red. Deployment limiting medical profiles will also make an Airman's IMR show red. Airmen with overdue IMR items, and those who have deployment limiting profiles count against the JB Charleston Medical Readiness Rate and are reflected in the 21 percent mentioned earlier who are not green. JB Charleston currently ranks eleventh out of 12 Air Mobility Command bases in IMR rates -- I know we can do better!

The responsibility to ensure the highest IMR rate falls to commanders, Unit Deployment Managers and ultimately Airmen themselves. Unit leadership has the hands-on ability to identify and monitor the IMR status of their Airmen. Commanders and UDMs have 24/7 access to IMR reports via the Aeromedical Services Info Management System web application. UDMs are responsible for ensuring Airmen are aware of their IMR requirements and for scheduling their annual Preventive Health Assessment appointment through the 628 MDG Preventive Health Clinic Community of Practice, on the AF Knowledge Now website. Finally, Airmen are responsible for knowing their medical readiness status, reporting for all scheduled appointments at the medical clinic and completing all required items in the six elements of their IMR.

This is a simple overview, but it is important that all Airmen understand the importance of the IMR program. Failure to maintain a IMR status places a burden on fellow Airmen who may have to fill someone else's deployment tasking and also adds unnecessary administrative workload for command resources and medical personnel, detracting from the Department of Defense's ability to meet mission goals and requirements. A healthy or green status helps ensure we accomplish our Air Force Fly, Fight and Win mission.