DHA Needs More Money To Develop New EHR
The Defense Health Agency asks for $1.6 billion to support operations and maintenance of health information management systems
The Defense Health Agency (DHA) has requested a seven percent increase in their budget for next year, asking for a total of $1.6 billion. This budget is to "support operations and maintenance of health information management systems," reports Nextgov. "DHA, which replaced the TRICARE Management Activity last October, also requested $91.3 million in new research and development budget line for the Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization project to develop a new EHR by 2017. The VA department requested $269 million in 2015 to develop its next generation EHR."
According to FierceHealthIT, "The proposed budget would more than triple funding for its work on an integrated EHR with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and DHA wants that $19.9 million from 2014 to grow to $68.3 million next year." The article adds, "The DHA, which opened last Oct. 1, is intended to streamline healthcare among the Army, Navy and Air Force medical departments. The DHA also operates Tricare."
Director of healthcare IT, Dave Bowen, said, "We basically were asked to develop a business case around how we would consolidate the military healthcare resources within IT and the other services within a shared services model as well, and provide that on a services basis back to the services."
According to Federal News Radio, "Bowen is in charge of the IT portion of those shared services. He said on Oct. 1 about 750 government and military employees and 1,000 contractors moved into DHA's IT shop. He expects the DHA IT shop to reach full operating capability in October 2015 when all the facility and regional IT employees will join the organization on a full-time basis. DHA's IT budget is about $2 billion to cover about 56 hospitals, about 350 clinics and 9.6 million members in the military's health plan."
It was announced last month that the VA begun planning on their next generation EHR system, as reported by Health IT Outcomes. "The focus on the upgrade will be to offer a streamlined information system between the VA and Department of Defense. The Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture is the current system used by the VA that contains an outdated base code in the Mumps language. With local code additions and patches used, the entire system has gotten very complicated over the years."