USU research at MHSRS 2026 spans allied trauma systems, a personal therapy for post-traumatic stress, and battlefield casualty evacuation.

August 5, 2026 by USU External Affairs

On the second day of the 2026 Military Health System Research Symposium (MHSRS), Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU) researchers discussed problems that reach well past the laboratory: how two nations' medical systems can share one trauma network, how a service member keeps going with therapy for post-traumatic stress, and how the wounded get evacuated when the usual routes are cut.

Building a Trauma System Two Militaries Can Share

Low- and middle-income countries carry nearly 90 percent of the world's deaths from trauma, and in many of them the military and civilian medical systems operate in near-total isolation from each other. Survival often depends on the care delivered in the first hour, before anyone has time to coordinate.

U.S. Navy Capt. Tamara Worlton, director of the Division of Global Surgery at USU and director of surgical operations at the National Institute for Defense Health Cooperation (NIDHC), presented Phase 3 findings from a multi-year effort to connect those two systems in the Philippines. The goal was a single national trauma response that a country's armed forces and its civilian hospitals could run together.

The work centered on a four-day consensus workshop in December 2025 that gathered 74 leaders, from frontline combat medics to the Philippine secretary of health. Worlton's team sorted them into peer-level groups so rank would not silence anyone, then had them rate gaps across the World Health Organization's six building blocks of a health system, from service delivery to governance. Worlton framed the question at the center of it all.

"When we have gaps in the trauma system and we have a siloed military trauma system and a siloed civilian trauma system, where can we work together to optimize capacity and capability?" Worlton said.

The sessions surfaced concrete places where the two systems could reinforce each other in peacetime, disaster, and conflict: giving civilian patients a pathway to military aircraft for evacuation from remote islands, embedding military treatment units alongside civilian teams during mass-casualty surges, and building shared, real-time tracking of surgical supplies. Worlton made the supply problem plain, describing how often a surgeon reaches for a suture that isn't there.

"This is happening every day, and when we get into a disaster or conflict, having real-time inventory checks and stockpiling is going to be critical," Worlton said.

The workshop's effects reached past the research. For many participants, it was the first time civilian health officials and military leaders had planned in the same room, and it fed directly into joint medical training during Exercise Balikatan, an annual U.S.-Philippine exercise. Worlton described how far apart the two sides had started.

"Many people who were working in the civilian system had never talked to anybody who worked in the Armed Forces of the Philippines," Worlton said.

Asked about the single biggest obstacle to putting the plans into practice, Worlton pointed to legal authority. Getting the underlying legislation in place, she said, is what lets local leaders act rather than wait. Her team is now preparing to carry the same method to Eastern Europe, including Poland and the Baltic nations.

A More Personal Way to Treat PTSD

Standard treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) work, but many patients drop out of them before they finish. Dr. Michael Roy, a professor of Medicine and deputy director of USU's Military Traumatic Brain Injury Initiative (MTBI2), presented work on a therapy built to hold onto them: 3MDR, short for multi-modular memory desensitization and reconsolidation.

In 3MDR, the patient walks on a treadmill through the session while working through material they chose themselves: a song that pulls them back to the trauma, a calming song to end on, and personal images that stand in for the memory, each paired with a dual-task eye-movement exercise. The design gives patients a personal stake, aimed squarely at the dropout that sinks standard therapies like cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure.

Roy's team also worked to make the therapy affordable and portable. Adapted to run on a $300 to $400 curved gaming monitor set in front of a treadmill, it produced a 17-point drop on the PTSD Checklist in the team's CARE for PTSD study. A newer version, MATE-3MDR, brings in music and art therapists who help patients choose their music and create original artwork focused on post-traumatic growth; among the first 10 patients to finish, scores fell an average of 26 points. Every participant carried both PTSD and a history of traumatic brain injury, a pairing common in the force, which suggests the approach holds up for service members managing both at once.

For a service member who has walked away from talk therapy before, a version that reaches a clinic on a $300 screen could be the difference between starting over and finishing.

Building a Community Around Battlefield Evacuation

U.S. Air Force Col. Adam Willis, an associate professor of Neurology at USU, took the moderator's chair again, this time for a session on autonomous casualty evacuation in large-scale combat operations, the problem of moving the wounded when the air and ground routes medics rely on are contested or cut. It is a hard problem, and one no single field can answer.

Willis used his time less to settle the question than to organize the people working on it. He urged the audience to trade names and contacts and to keep the discussion alive between symposia, then handed off to the session's speakers. Solving it, he said, would take the whole community rather than any one discipline.

Across three different rooms, the same idea surfaced: research counts only when it reaches the person waiting on it, whether an allied medic in a remote province, a service member in therapy, or a casualty who needs a way out that no longer comes easily.