After months of waiting, the Department of Defense flipped the switch. The DoD rolled out its new electronic health record system at its first location on Tuesday.
Cerner Corp. landed a contract in July 2015 to build a system that would enable medical data sharing between the DoD, Department of Veterans Affairs and the private sector. Cerner, Leidos, Accenture, Henry Schein and several other companies submitted the winning bid as the Leidos Partnership for Defense Health.
“This has been an exemplary project so far, and an early success of the results of collaboration between the Department of Defense, Cerner, Leidos, Accenture and other partners,” Cerner President Zane Burke said during Thursday’s earnings conference call.
The MHS Genesis system was originally set to roll out at two bases in December, but the DoD pushed back implementation to February to provide the “best possible user experience.”
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Despite the delay, MHS Genesis is still on schedule to be implemented across the DoD’s entire system by 2022. The DoD set a $4.6 million budget for the first segment of the contract.
“This is an important day that is designed to have a positive impact on the health care of our service members, beneficiaries and their families,” the Leidos Partnership for Defense Health said in a statement. “MHS Genesis is an important part of the DoD’s strategic vision to modernize the way care is delivered in the military and help improve wide-scale interoperability between the private and public sectors.”
The DoD currently has 55 military medical centers and hospitals, and 352 health clinics. The platform will support more than 9.4 million DoD beneficiaries once it is fully implemented. In the long term, the goal is to communicate information to facilities across the world for deployed members.
“There will be more go-live events throughout the summer,” Burke said. “From there, we expect broader deployment over the next several years.”
A chart shared by the Defense Health Agency stated that the system would begin being deployed in the Pacific Northwest, starting with Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Wash.; Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash.; and naval hospital in Oak Harbor and Bremerton, Wash.
Date: February 09, 2017