Bids are in for $11B DOD health records system

Four teams of vendors are submitting bids today for the Defense Department’s 10-year, $11 billion overhaul of its health care system, which serves 9.7 million beneficiaries at 56 hospitals and about 365 clinics.

The DOD Healthcare Management Systems Modernization (DHMSM) is expected to modernize the Military Health System’s clinical systems and provide electronic health records that will be interoperable with those of the Veteran Affairs Department, which is doing its own modernization.

The teams bidding on DHMSM, pronounced “dim sum,” all feature established integrators paired with EHR specialists, an approach DOD had encouraged early on in the process. All have variously touted the security, interoperability and scalability of their systems. A quick look at the bidders:

• IBM and Epic
• CSC, Hewlett-Packard and Allscripts 
• Leidos, Accenture Federal Services and Cerner  
• PricewaterhouseCoopers (which these days goes by PwC), along with General Dynamics Information Technology, DSS, Medsphere Systems Corporation and Medicasoft.

DOD’s road to modernized electronic health records has been a long one, and has included a failed effort with VA to build a joint system. That project was abandoned in February 2013, after years of effort and nearly $30 billion in costs.

Since then, the departments have taken separate routes, with DOD launching DHMSM to replace its Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application (AHLTA) system, and VA modernizing its modernizing its Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, or VistA, system. Both sides have promised that their records will be interoperable.