The number of health conditions covered under the Defense Department’s pilot program that allows recruits with disqualifying medical issues to enlist without a waiver has gone up from 36 to 51, a senior defense official said.

The medical accession records pilot (MARPS) now includes 51 health conditions that require the department to waive it as disqualifying, allowing recruits to join the military without a waiver as long as they meet certain requirements.

Katie Helland, the military accessions policy director in the office of the under secretary for personnel and readiness, told reporters Wednesday the current phase of MARPS focuses on collecting data to understand how quickly the department can process applicants with those conditions.

“The whole intent of this pilot is to test the feasibility if we can shorten these time frames and with the data to then make that decision to then modify our medical accession standards,” said Helland. “Largely, we are seeing positive results, and we’ll continue to monitor the data to make that decision about these conditions on whether we can build them into our standards instruction.”

When the Defense Department rolled out its new medical records platform known as Military Health System Genesis across Military Entrance Processing Stations, the system allowed access to potential recruits’ entire health records. That meant the processing stations had a lot more information to assess people against than before. 

Prior to Genesis, applicants could omit minor medical issues since they self-reported their medical history. The system now flags every irregularity, causing a backlog due to increased workload reviewing disqualifying conditions and processing waiver requests.

Helland said one of the technical solutions the department introduced to handle the workload was introducing natural language processing, a tool to automatically scan medical records and identify key elements relevant to eligibility. This helps reduce the time required to manually review documents by highlighting relevant data.

The department also overhauled the pre-screening process, where applicants’ documents are reviewed prior to sending them to a military entrance processing station.

“Through our overhaul of the process, now 80% of our applicants are cleared to go to MEPS within 48 hours of starting that pre-screened process. For those 20% that have more complex medical histories, we’ve reduced the time frame where it used to be about 29 days on average to get them to MEPS to down to below seven [days],” said Helland.

Current data shows approximately 77% of young people between the ages of 17 and 24 are not qualified for military service without some type of waiver. And according to DoD internal data, the services’ average processing times for medical waivers as of January 2024 are:

• 83 days for the Army;
• 5-6 days for the Navy;
• 95 days for the Air Force; and
  
• 12 days for the Marine Corps.

Between fiscal 2016 and fiscal 2020, DoD’s accession medical standards analysis and research activity reported eye and vision disorders, musculoskeletal conditions, and psychiatric disorders were among top reasons for medical disqualification among recruits.

The launch of Genesis, in a way, coincides with recruitment challenges the military services have experienced over the last several years. The Air Force, for instance, had to add 63 medical administrator contractors last fall to help with gathering and screening of recruits’ medical records.

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