The Leidos-led team that won the Department of Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization (DHMSM) award — that is, the DoD EHR modernization project — has made another addition to its squad for the purposes of health IT integration and health information exchange.
The Leidos Partnership for Defense Health now includes Orion Health as a subcontractor, the health IT company announced Monday.
“Orion Health is proud to be part of the Leidos Partnership for Defense Health, the team that has been selected as the best value solution for the DHMSM contract,” President Paul Viskovich said in a public statement.
“Together, our qualified and experienced team is working with the Department of Defense to deliver a world class interoperable electronic health records solution for our nation’s armed forces, their families and beneficiaries,” he continued. “We look forward to the work ahead and are committed to improving access to comprehensive healthcare data in order to facilitate improved clinical outcomes for our deserving men and women in uniform.”
According to the statement, the partnership is looking to take advantage of the company’s health IT integration engine to facilitate the exchange of health data between the DoD Cerner EHR and the health IT systems of non-military healthcare organizations and providers.
Last month, the Leidos Partnership for Defense Health added Clinovations Government + Health to spearhead the team’s training of “clinicians, nurses, clinical advisors and clinically-trained technical personnel to help the delivery team ensure the resulting solution is finely tuned for the military’s medical environment.”
The focus now appears to be shifting to the technical nuts and bolts of ensuring that health data flows inside and outside the Military Health System, a decisive factor in the Leidos bid winning the DHMSM contract.
“Cerner’s demonstration of wide-ranging provider interoperability on multiple, different platforms were the huge differentiator over Epic’s garden-walled methodology to system user data sharing,” Black Book Managing Partner Doug Brown told EHRIntelligence.com when the contract was awarded.
As part of the Leidos-led bid, Cerner beat out rivals Epic Systems and Allscripts for the project that could approach $10 billion when all is said and one.
According to research published by IDC Health Insights, financials also proved to be a key differentiator between the Cerner- and Epic-backed bids.
“The DoD’s requirements are unique, which makes comparisons difficult, but pricing was surely a critical factor in the DoD decision,” the research organization stated. “IDC Health Insights views the pricing of the winning bid as having come in quite low when compared with commercial EHR contracts in recent years. This gives the DoD the potential to realize higher ROI from its EHR investment than is likely possible at many private health systems.”
The company will be hosting its annual user conference next week and new details about the DoD EHR modernization project are likely to emerge.
