LONDON, UK: As the US Department of Defense (DoD) closes the competitive bidding process on its $11 billion Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization (DHMSM) programme, lawmakers remain skeptical about the 10-year project’s ability to deliver, according to an analyst with research and consulting firm GlobalData.
The DHMSM is a contract to replace the US military’s clinical legacy system, the Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application (AHLTA), which covers 9.8 million beneficiaries. The contract will also tie together the DoD’s Electronic Health Records (EHR) with VistaA, the clinical platform used at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), to enable data sharing.
The contract is expected to be awarded in 3Q 2015, and the Pentagon would like to have initial operational capabilities by the end of 2017, with the full system up and running by 2023.
Adam Dion, GlobalData’s Analyst covering Healthcare Industry Dynamics, states that while many EHR firms and system integrators are vying for the coveted contract, the team led by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which includes DSS, Medsphere and General Dynamics, is best positioned to solve the interoperability issues plaguing previous EHR modernization efforts.
Dion explains: “The PwC-led team is proposing an open-source EHR that would promote greater ease of integration with the existing DoD systems and comply with government requirements surrounding patient safety and quality standards. This proposal would also offer more flexibility compared to other options that would lock the government into a single technology.
“By creating a secure and virtualized infrastructure for all members of the DoD and VA healthcare systems, millions of service members will be able to share applications, insurance and health information with doctors and providers, thereby establishing a continuum of care.”
The analyst notes that an earlier aborted project fully satisfied just one of the six statutory conditions stipulated by lawmakers in Congress, despite costing more than $1 billion over a five-year period.
Dion comments: “Not to be fooled twice, lawmakers have attached budgetary restrictions on the DHMSM contract, binding project funding to the awardees’ ability to attain data interoperability standards between the DoD and VA clinical systems.
“With the new contract open to private IT vendors, the hope is to find a commercial solution that will succeed where past public sector efforts have failed. However, given the size and scope of the project, the DHMSM contract will come under considerable scrutiny, particularly after the very ugly public rollout of the HealthCare.gov website,” the analyst concludes.
