It looks like the DoD and VA may yet again be making progress toward creating an integrated health record, after a long stretch when it looked like the project was dead, according to Healthcare IT News.
This is a gigantic effort, and expenses for executing it are gigantic too. In September 2012, the Interagency Program Office estimated the final costs for the iEHR at between $8 billion to $12 billion.
The course of the project has been bumpy, with key players shifting direction more than once. Most recently, the DoD had announced in May that it was looking for an EHR on the commercial market, seemingly dropping plans for creating an iEHR with the VA. But now the two agencies have awarded a re-compete contract for creating the iEHR, HIN reports.
Last week, the Interagency Program office said that Systems Made Simple had won the contract, under which the company would provide systems integration and engineering support for creating the iEHR. SMS had previously won the contract in 2012, but that contract called for it to bid again in a competitive process.
The idea behind the iEHR has been and continues to be creating a system that can present a single record for each military veteran, complete with all clinical information held by the two giant agencies.
However, for a time it looked like the iEHR project was dead, when the two organizations announced that they were shifting their approach to buying technology from an outside vendor. Critics — including myself — sharply scolded the agencies when these plans came to light, with most suggesting that the new plan was doomed to fail.
Now, the integration game is on. SMS’s three main focus areas will be to establish data interoperability between the VA and DoD systems, plan a service-oriented architecture for the integration, and create terminology translation services that deliver data to users in a shared format, notes HIN.
With these goals met, SMS plans to “create data through a single, common health record between all VA and DoD medical facilities,” the company said in a statement.
Now, let’s hope that nobody in the agencies switches direction again. Let’s give this thing a chance to work, people!
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