The top program officer in charge of the Defense Department’s massive 10-year electronic health record system procurement said he expects four to six teams to compete for the contract. The winner will provide DOD with a commercial, off-the-shelf electronic records product for military hospitals, garrisons, battlefields, ships, submarines, and other care delivery sites in the military’s global health care system. That system serves a population of about 10 million active duty service members, their families, reservists, civilian defense employees and others.
Publicly, the effort has an $11 billion price tag – a number offered in congressional testimony and repeated frequently in press reports, including FCW’s. Chris Miller, the program executive running the procurement, dialed that back in a call with reporters June 25, indicating that the $11 billion covers the entire lifecycle of the program, through fiscal 2030. The Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization (DHMSM) will include a “multi-billion” award to a team consisting of a health record provider and a traditional IT integrator, for a 10-year period of performance.
“We wanted to build a contract structure …with incentives on the back side to make them perform the way we want,” Miller said, explaining why they are going with a 10-year contract. Additionally, the time it takes to install and train workers on the system in more than 1,000 locations argues for a longer-term contract, he said.
So far, two teams have announced plans to bid for the work. IBM and health record firm EPIC announced a partnership earlier this month, while Computer Sciences Corp. is leading an effort with health record provider Allscripts along with Hewlett Packard to go after the business. The Department of Veterans Affairs has expressed interest in bringing its VistA health record system into DOD. More such pairings are expected to be announced in the coming months as industry readies for the final request for proposals, which is due to be released by the end of September.
Military health providers from the top of the chain of command down to the service delivery level are looking forward to an upgrade. Maj. Gen. Brian Lein, the deputy surgeon general and deputy commanding eneral of the Army Medical Command, said military physicians are using multiple portals to copy and paste information into different iterations of health records. The current system is “electronic but not integrated,” he said at a June 25 industry day for vendors that attracted more than 400 attendees.
Also critical to the success of the program is the ability to access and update the heath record in remote areas under hostile conditions. Col. Jennifer Caci, commander of the 62nd Medical Brigade, recalled that in Afghanistan just last year, wounded soldiers were being moved from one level of care to another with their medical orders rubber-banded to their bodies. This inevitably leads to confusion about patient information, and what interventions have been performed by medical corpsmen or field hospital personnel. “Even something as simple as a soldier’s blood type can be confounded by the combat environment or a mass casualty situation, resulting in catastrophic outcomes,” Caci said.
