Sales Opportunities within MHS

by Tim Larkins, Senior Manager, Market Intelligence

The Military Health System (MHS) provides healthcare services to nearly 10 million beneficiaries including active and retired military personnel and their dependents. Providing care from the battlefield to hospitals to domestic clinics is no easy feat.  To support this, the agency is increasingly relying on IT to improve healthcare delivery to its beneficiaries.

The total FY13 Unified Healthcare budget request is down 16% from last year to $48.7 billion. The agency’s IT budget is also slightly down (6%) from prior year levels to $1.87 billion.  Should sequestration occur, veterans’ healthcare will be safe as will basic and retirement pay for DoD personnel, and funding for housing.  TRICARE will not be exempt in sequestration and thus faces significant cuts that will most likely lead to a reduction in personnel.

From an IT perspective, MHS’ CIO will focus on improving infrastructure operations and electronic health records. The agency’s strategic IT plans include:

• Architecture & Processes – Refine requirements management process to improve product quality and time to market
•  Electronic Health Records  – Introduce products that enable providers to efficiently enter and retrieve information
• Governance – Design a new IT governance structure and portfolio management that allow integrated capabilities and promotes better decision making
• Enterprise Intelligence- Enhance intelligence through enterprise tools and services to make information visible, accessible, understandable, and trustable
• Personal Health Agenda – Implement a comprehensive MHS wide patient portal and personal health record
• IT Interoperability – Establish interoperability with private sector healthcare providers and organizations and other business partners
• Maximize Portfolio Value
• Innovative Technologies – Identify, research, develop, test, and evaluate new solutions to benefit the MHS enterprise and beneficiaries
• Human Capital Management
• Distributed Development

If you want to learn more about MHS’ FY13 budget request and the sales opportunities it offers, take a moment to watch this brief video taken from a recent market intelligence briefing I conducted.