National Center for Telehealth & Technology (T2) | a DCoE Center

T2 surveillance programs

T2’s surveillance programs monitor suicide events across the DoD, providing the opportunity to study risk and prevention factors in military personnel.

DoD Suicide Risk Management & Surveillance Office (SRMSO)

The Suicide Risk Management & Surveillance Office (SRMSO) helps the Department of Defense standardize and track suicide events and their risk/protective factors. For the first time, this program provides the opportunity to examine suicide risk and protective factors across the DoD and between Services. In addition, it provides a surveillance system to detect how these risk factors may change over time as the DoD mission or military population changes.

The SRMSO engages in research and special projects to maximize the benefits of data collected and to improve suicide prevention knowledge. For example, SRMSO is piloting the Caring Letters project in a military population, which involves sending caring notes to high risk individuals following a psychiatric hospitalization.

Future plans for the program include the addition a DoDSER control group to analyze suicide risk factors, and the development user accounts in the DoDSER software with save and account management features.

Department of Defense Suicide Event Report (DoDSER)

The Department of Defense Suicide Event Report is a sophisticated web software system that allows the military to capture detailed information about suicide events. The DoDSER enables DoD-level data collection and reporting of suicide events and risk/protective factors. This information can then be used to brief senior leaders on risk factor data across all Services. Historically, all the service branches used idiosyncratic suicide surveillance systems. In January of 2008, the DoDSER was launched as a DoD solution to monitor all branches of the military.

Planned growth for the DoDSER includes developing new features such as Common Access Card login, account management features, and functionality to save incomplete reports.

Suicide Prevention: Caring Letters Project

There is a dearth of quality research available on effective suicide prevention practices. To our knowledge, only one suicide prevention approach has reduced suicide rates in randomized, controlled trials. It involved regularly mailing “caring letters” to high-risk individuals hospitalized for depression or suicidal behaviors (Motto & Bostrom, 2001). T2 is implementing a caring letters pilot program to improve our knowledge about the potential of similar programs in military populations.

Program Benefits

  • Data collection software ensures success of the world-wide suicide surveillance mission
  • Ability to analyze and report on suicide factors in real-time
  • Opportunity to examine data across the Department of Defense

Partnerships/Collaborations

Army, Air Force, Navy and the Marines currently use the DoDSER.

Page last updated August 24, 2009.

This site is the official Web site of the National Center for Telehealth & Technology (T2), A Defense Centers of Excellence (DCoE) Center. The appearance of hyperlinks does not constitute endorsement by the Department of Defense of this Web site or the information, products or services contained therein. For other than authorized activities such as military exchanges and Morale, Welfare and Recreation sites, the Department of Defense does not exercise any editorial control over the information you may find at these locations. Such links are provided consistent with the stated purpose of this DoD Web site.
Please read our privacy and security notice.