$11 Billion DoD EHR Contract

Nextgov has a great article up which outlines many of the details of the soon to be bid out Healthcare Management Systems Modernization contract. I’d prefer to call it the DoD EHR Contract or AHLTA replacement contract. Certainly there’s more to it than EHR, but that will be the core of the contract and the big name EHR vendors will all be involved.

Here’s a section of the article which gives you an idea of the size of the contract:

The DHMSM contract’s estimated lifecycle value is approximately $11 billion and would include initial operating capabilities by 2017 and full functionality by 2023, according to Dr. Jonathan Woodson, assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs, who testified in February before the House Appropriations Committee’s defense panel.

Even in Washington, $11 billion is a lot of money, and it would surely rank among the largest IT-related contracts in government. What’s unique about this effort is that the Pentagon wants a single contractor to lead the integration of a commercial electronic health records system to cover its nearly 10 million beneficiaries and large assortment of health care facilities worldwide. Defense is one of the largest health care providers in the country, on par in size with the Veterans Affairs Department and private sector leaders like Kaiser Permanente.

The article also states that they want to issue a contract with one vendor. We’ll see how that plays out. I’ve seen some rumors out there about who will be bidding. No doubt it will be a combination of the usual government contractors and EHR consultant companies together with EHR vendors like Epic and Cerner.

What’s going to be really interesting is the VA and its Vista EHR (Vista Evolution) is said to be bidding on the contract as well. We’ll see if they’re the only Vista bid or if others join in as well.

Here’s another great insight into the DoD EHR Contract:

Major data gaps in patient records occur when health care is delivered to beneficiaries outside the DOD network, and today approximately half of DOD’s 9.8 million beneficiaries receive their health care outside the network.

This was an obvious complaint of the AHLTA system. The DoD and VA couldn’t even get their EHR systems to be interoperable. I’m not optimistic that interoperability will be obtainable even under this new contract. That includes DoD to VA interoperability, let alone trying to connect with the care the DoD beneficiaries receive outside the DoD network.

I realize that nothing with the DoD health system is simple. Its an enormous system with all sorts of crazy government regulations. However, I’d hope for $11 billion, we could do better than we’re doing for our veterans.

At HIMSS, I talked with a largely military EHR vendor. They told me that they were close to being able to exchange records between different locations. That’s right. At HIMSS 2014 the amazing breakthrough was that 2 locations with the same EHR software were close to being able to exchange data.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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