Cerner exec: Delay on initial military EHR rollout won’t slow overall project

In July 2015, federal contractor Leidos teamed with electronic health records vendor Cerner and consulting firm Accenture Federal to win the coveted Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization contract. The deal, worth anywhere from $4.3 billion to more than $9 billion, depending on add-on work, will replace the aging EHR system at all U.S. Military Health System installations at home and abroad.

Department of Defense officials delayed the initial deployment of the EHR, dubbed MHS Genesis, from December 2016 until February 2017. But the delay only applies to the pilot site, Naval Hospital Bremerton in Bremerton, Washington.

In fact, Cerner President Zane Burke is not fazed at all by the pushback.

“The overall project is still on the same timeline,” Burke said in a recent interview with MedCity News. (Read what he said on other topics here.)

“The initial deployment is eight weeks different than initially, so you’re talking a very minimal shift. In the scheme of how this is, it’s going incredibly well, and we’re really pleased with the work that the partnership — the Leidos Partnership for Health — as well the DoD,” Burke added.

In the meantime, North Kansas City, Mo.-based Cerner and its partners have been concentrating on the preimplementation work for MHS Genesis, including workflow redesign, planning and testing.

“That’s all going very well,” Burke reported. “I feel really good about the work that’s being done.”

More importantly to Cerner, the company is learning from its early work with the DoD, experience that can carry over to commercial customers and position Cerner to land additional federal work. In fact, it already has.

A few weeks before scoring the big deal, Cerner won a contract to replace the Military Health System’s anatomic pathology laboratory information system.

Cerner, Leidos and Accenture Federal this year won a 10-year add-on contract to provide data hosting services for MHS Genesis, worth a reported $75 million.

“There are other pieces of business in the DoD,” Burke said. “The more they go through and understand the capabilities, the more they say, ‘This wasn’t in our initial scope, but now that we understand it,'” the Pentagon is expanding the scope of Cerner’s work.

“I think you can expect more of those kinds of things within the DoD. Even the core rollout to the theater was not bid as part of the original contract,” Burke said, referring to EHR installations outside the U.S. and aboard aircraft carriers.

Aircraft carriers set up an interesting opportunity for Cerner to expand in telemedicine. The vendor has offered remote ICU services to civilian hospitals for years, so telemedicine is not new.

But the nature of serving floating hospitals in the middle of an ocean has prompted Cerner to explore “sometimes connected” telemedicine in case full broadband isn’t immediately available, according to Burke. This is informing development of technology on terra firma.

“This will actually help our core clients as well because there’s a lot of applicability around telemedicine, around ‘sometimes connected,'” Burke said. “If you think about a home care person, connectivity is not always perfect, so you need that sometimes-connected nature.”

Early experience with aircraft carriers also is helping Cerner improve its support for cloud-hosted customers.

“What we’re building here for the DoD also is applicable in that environment for our core clients,” Burke said, noting that Cerner has not developed custom code for the Pentagon.

“There’s one Cerner code set, so hopefully this will help around telemedicine, around ‘sometimes connected’ and even the ease of use in supporting an application because obviously you can’t have a full IT staff on an aircraft carrier,” he explained. “We’re actually creating easier-to-support models, which we will roll to our full client base.”

During an earning call in late October, Burke hinted that Cerner may bid on the forthcoming contract to replace EHRs at the Department of Veterans Affairs, though he did not explicitly say the company would. He dropped a similar hint when talking with MedCity News.

“Our objective is to put our heads down, do really good work on the DoD. It will make a lot of sense to have a lifetime servicemen and -women record as you move forward [from active duty to veteran status]. The best thing we can do is be really successful on the DoD, and that’s our objective,” Burke said.

Photo: Flickr user David B. Gleason