Cerner, Leidos, Accenture Join Forces In DoD Bid
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Why the DoD EHR contract and upcoming bidding war matters.
The U.S. Department of Defense is seeking a commercial solution to replace its current electronic health record and information system. As Health IT Outcomes reported earlier this year, the DoD signed a $70.7 million bridge contract with Leidos to “support military electronic health record systems over the next 11 months.” While the department has not yet issued a final request for new proposals, several partnerships have already formed to compete for the contract worth approximately $11 billion.
Cerner Corp. has teamed up with experienced government contractors Leidos and Accenture Federal Services to try to win the multibillion-dollar contract to build, install, and configure a replacement EHR system for the Defense Department's health system.
There’s a lot of competition for the 10-year contract, which would cover 56 hospitals and about 360 clinics serving about 9.7 million beneficiaries from the U.S. military and its dependents. It would include work for Veterans Affairs facilities.
The Cerner alliance is competing with a previously announced joint effort by IBM Corp. and Cerner’s largest EHR competitor, Epic Systems Corp. And Modern Healthcare further reports Computer Sciences Corp., Hewlett-Packard, and Allscripts have also announced they would bid for the contract as well.
In February 2013, the Defense Department and the VA scrapped a five-year-old plan to jointly develop an EHR to serve both departments' vast healthcare empires, citing the high cost – estimates for which ranged widely to upward of about $15 billion.
Kate O’Neill Rauber, a Cerner spokeswoman, said Cerner’s goal is to provide a “highly interoperable” system “built on modern and open architecture.” On June 11, IBM Corp. and Epic Systems Corp. announced they intend to bid on what's being called the Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization project, or DHMSM, pronounced “dim sum.”
SAIC has at least a 25-year history with the MHS, having built its Composite Health Care System from software code supplied by the Veterans Affairs Department under a $1 billion contract awarded in 1988. That system, known as CHCS, is still in use in military hospitals because its proposed successor, AHLTA, failed to become its total replacement.
“Our goal is to provide the best solution at the best value—a world-class solution that is highly interoperable, built on modern and open architecture, and designed and deployed by a team with unmatched expertise in implementing complex systems around the globe,” Cerner spokeswoman Kate O'Neill Rauber said in an e-mail confirming the partnership.
In addition to CHCS and AHLTA, the new system will replace the EHR components of Theater Medical Information Program-Joint, which includes AHLTA-Theater, Theater Medical Information Program Composite Health Care System Cache and AHLTA-Mobile. The DoD expects between four and six bids on the project. A winner is expected to be announced by the end of the year.