The Department of Defense (DoD) has opted to keep its legacy electronic health record system for the time being, issuing a solicitation for a contractor to sustain its current systems for possibly as long as another four years (until 2018).
The solicitation, posted Dec. 31, 2013, and updated Jan. 2, 2014, by the Defense Health Agency (DHA), is seeking a vendor "to provide for the comprehensive system maintenance, logistical operations and maintenance, site operations, and subject matter expertise [SME] support for CHCS, [the Composite Health Care System], AHLTA [The Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application] and the CDR [Clinical Data Repository]."
Responses to the solicitation are due Feb. 13.
The move is in contrast to DoD's solicitation last October to commercial EHR vendors to demonstrate their off-the-shelf enterprise EHRs. Twenty–seven vendors had participated in that demonstration, including Epic, Allscripts and Cerner, as well as the Veterans' Administration (VA).
The DHA is a new agency--opened Oct. 1, 2013--intended to streamline healthcare among the Army, Navy and Air Force medical departments. The DHA also will operate Tricare.
The DoD and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs had been under pressure to build an integrated EHR from scratch, but abandoned that plan in February 2013. Funding legislation agreed to by the House and Senate last month requires the DoD and the VA to report to Congress later this month about a new plan to build a single or interoperable EHR.
To learn more:
- here's the solicitation