New Pentagon Health Record Procurement Offers IT Opportunities

By Rick Antonucci, Analyst

The Pentagon has released procurement information for their new Electronic Health Record (EHR) to be released by 2016 as part of the Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization (DHMSM) Program. The Draft RFP  has been released by SPAWAR and procures a replacement EHR for the Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application (AHLTA).

This is functioning as a replacement for the previously scrapped iEHR initiative to standardize records across the DOD and VA. The joint EHR was dropped after massive cost overruns and pushback from the technical personnel concerned about giving up ownership of the system. Congress has replaced the requirement for a joint EHR with the goal of interoperability, meaning that there must be the ability to exchange information between agencies based on common standards.

This new system will be taking advantage of COTS solutions and existing industry standards and will be released in two phases. Phase one will cover hospitals and clinics, deployed by geographic region, and the second phase will cover ships, field hospitals, and medevac craft. The plan is to begin implementation in late 2016 and wrap up in 2019.

What all this means is that there are concrete opportunities upcoming to be a part of the DOD’s next generation EHR and to influence the requirements so as to ensure success of the mission for contractors and the government. Attending the February 19th Industry Day will be a good start in making sure that you understand the DOD’s needs and can help to make suggestions to create the right requirements.

The DRFP was updated February 5^th to modify the deadline for submissions to March 3^rd at 12PM EST.