The Defense Department has again changed its schedule for deploying a commercial-off-the-shelf initial EHR rollout from Cerner, following technical problems recognized during the time of testing.
Called Military Health System (MHS) GENESIS, the initial deployment of DoD’s latest EHR system was slated for the month of December. But, previous month, the Pentagon declared that the rollout would be delayed until the month of February to provide DoD and prime contractor Leidos extra time to resolve technical problems, involving finalizing system interfaces between Cerner’s software and legacy military health networks.
Nevertheless, DoD officials claimed on the day of Tuesday that the initial EHR rollout plan has again been modified.
In accordance to Stacy Cummings, program executive officer for Defense Healthcare Management Systems, the program schedule has been changed so that the initial EHR rollout deployment of MHS GENESIS will take place in the month of February only at Fairchild Air Force Base, near Spokane, Wash.
Although, Cummings was quick to add that deployment at the remaining inpatient services in the Pacific Northwest will start as early as the month of June and incorporate few capabilities—like blood transfusion management and voice recognition software—that were initially planned for release later in the deployment schedule. At the similar time, she asserted that the changed schedule won’t impact the previously declared full deployment target date of the 2022 year.
A 2016 audit of MHS GENESIS by DoD’s Office of the Inspector General discovered “dangers and potential delays engaged in developing and testing the interfaces required to interact with legacy systems, making sure the system is secure against the terrible cyber attacks, and making definite that the fielded system works rightly and that users are properly trained.”
Dealing these potential threats, Cummings appreciated that “we did set for ourselves a very aggressive schedule that involved important concurrency” but argued that “the time we invest in the program now will assist us to ensure success in the future and give the best possible user experience to our beneficiaries and healthcare contributors from day one—and, we won’t field a product that does not meet that standard.”
Previous year, DoD granted a $4.3 billion contract award to a Leidos-Cerner team to modernize its electronic health record system, replacing legacy military health systems and promoting higher efficiencies by leveraging the Cerner Millennium solution. Finally, the aim of MHS GENESIS is to support the presence of EHRs for more than 9.4 million DoD beneficiaries.
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