Congress keeping watchful eye over DoD’s electronic health record roll out

Defense

Congress keeping watchful eye over DoD’s electronic health record roll out

A new bill from House appropriators adds extra oversight to DoD's electronic health records program, which is just being released on select bases.

Scott Maucione@smaucioneWFED

March 6, 2017 3:42 pm

3 min read

Congress is keeping a close eye on the Defense Department it takes its first steps in deploying and integrating electronic health records systems.

The House Appropriations Committee is tightening the reins on the electronic health records program to make sure the Veterans Affairs Department’s health records system and DoD’s system are “completely and meaningfully” able to work together.

The 2017 House defense appropriations bill, which the committee released last week, puts a handful of oversight mechanisms on the electronic health records program to make sure it is implemented properly.

Just last month, Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane, Washington announced it is the first base to have the new electronic health record, called MHS Genesis.

But as DoD begins the long roll out over the next five years to transition all of its bases to the system, House appropriators want the department to check in.

The 2017 bill requires the program executive officer for the Defense Healthcare Management System to provide quarterly reports to the congressional defense committees and the Government Accountability Office on the cost a schedule of the program, milestones, knowledge points, acquisition timelines and quarterly obligation reports.

“These reports should also include any changes to the deployment timeline, including benchmarks, for full operating capability,” the explanatory statement of the bill reads.

Congress also wants to be notified of any changes to cost estimates and the status of how DoD’s records will work seamlessly with the VA’s records.

The House and Senate Appropriations Committees want DoD to inform them before entering into a contract or combination of contracts that exceed $5 million for electronic health record systems as well.

Congress’ oversight doesn’t stop at DoD either. The legislative branch wants quarterly briefings from the Interagency Program Office director on the progress of DoD and VA records programs and how they are working together. DoD must also provide the federal chief information officer with updates on the health records systems.

By 2022, DoD is expected to have Genesis deployed to all of DoD’s worldwide medical facilities and serve 9.4 million patients.

DoD awarded Leidos $4.3 billion to craft the Genesis system, which is based on commercial software developed by Cerner.

In 2013, DoD and VA decided to separately create programs to modernize their health records. At that point DoD was supposed to deploy its modern health record by the end of 2016. But last fall things went off the tracks delaying the initial roll out until February.

DoD officials previously said the delays were mostly caused by unforeseen complications in building the software interfaces needed to move data back and forth between Genesis and DoD’s legacy systems.

But a report by DoD’s independent director of test and evaluation (DOT&E) last month showed that cybersecurity was also a major factor as of last August: Tests had uncovered 11,000 cyber vulnerabilities “of varying severity” in both DoD’s own health IT infrastructure and the commercial shared services Genesis depends on. Most of the problems were related to commercial software patches not being installed, and Leidos told DOT&E it would solve the most severe vulnerabilities by Dec. 31, 2016.