The Military Health System will delay the implementation of its $4.3 billion Cerner electronic health records system by several months, pushing the go-live date at the first pilot site into 2017.
The rollout was to begin in December at Naval Hospital Bremerton outside Seattle. That hospital hosted four days of “system validation sessions” in early August, according to the U.S. Navy.
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But, a press release from the Department of Defense said that the office managing the project would announce a new timeline in the next 30 days. “The modification is driven by the aggressive schedule and issues identified during testing that led to the determination that more time is needed to correct these issues,” the release said.
The delay would likely be “a few months,” meaning the Bremerton implementation would not start until early next year.
“We have a responsibility to our customers to ensure that all required test procedures and processes are completed in an orderly manner,” Program Executive Officer Stacy Cummings said in the DoD statement. “During the testing of the system, we identified the need for more time before initial deployment to ensure we are providing the best possible user experience to our beneficiaries and healthcare providers.”
DoD awarded the massive contract to the team of federal contractor Leidos, EHR vendor Cerner and consultancy Accenture Federal in July 2015. Another partner, Henry Schein, will provide a dental records system as part of the contract.
Leidos, Cerner and Accenture Federal later won a 10-year add-on contract to provide data hosting services for the EHR. That contract was initially valued at $50.7 million, but was revised to about $75 million, Politico reported in July.
The Leidos-led group beat out competing bids that would have made Epic Systems or Allscripts Healthcare Solutions the primary EHR vendor for DoD healthcare facilities. All told, the implementation could be worth about $9 billion over 10 years.
The Military Health System named the new records system MHS Genesis earlier this year. The overarching program is known as the Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization, or DHMSM, pronounced “dim sum.”
Photo: Flickr user David B. Gleason
