Earlier this month,we shared the news that Epic and IBM had gotten together to fight for the DoD’s massive Healthcare Management Systems Modernization project. The project is to replace the current Military Health System, which should serve some 9.7 million beneficiaries. The winning team should make about $11 billion to do the work.
So it’s little wonder that another group of health IT giants have stepped up to fight for such a juicy prize. A group lead by Computer Sciences Corp., whose partners include Allscripts and HP, has announced that it intends to compete for the contract.
The HMSM project is extremely ambitious. It’s intended to connect varied healthcare systems across the globe, located at Army hospitals, on Naval vessels, in battlefield clinics and more, into a single open, interoperable platform serving not only active-duty members, but also reservists and civilian contractors.
Before you burst out laughing at the idea that any EMR vendor could pull this off, it’s worth considering that perhaps their partners can. It’s hard to argue that CSC has a long track record in both government and private sector health IT work, and HP has 50 years with of experience in developing IT projects military health and VA projects.
That being said, one has to wonder whether Allscripts — which is boasting of bringing an open architecture to the project — can really put his money where its mouth is. (One could say the same of Epic, which frequently describes its platform as interoperable but has a reputation of being interoperable only from one Epic installation to the other.)
To be fair, both project groups have about as much integration firepower as anyone on earth. Maybe, if the winner manages to create an interoperable platform for the military, they’ll bring that to private industry and will see some real information sharing there.
That being said, I remain skeptical that the DoD is going to get what it’s paying for; as far as I know, there is no massively interoperable platform in existence that meets the specs this project has. That’s not an absolute dealbreaker, but it should raise some eyebrows.
Bottom line, the DoD seems determined to give it a try, regardless of the shaky state of interoperability in the industry overall. And its goals seem to be the right ones. After all, who wouldn’t want an open platform that lends itself to future change and development? Sadly, however, I think it’s more likely that will be shaking our heads over the collapse of the project some years from now.
