DoD-Cerner MHS Genesis Project Moves onto New Site Locations
The Department of Defense (DoD) is moving onto a second set of site locations for its Cerner electronic health record (EHR) rollouts, according to an article in the Federal Times.
Back in January, it was announced that the EHR modernization project, called MHS Genesis, would be suspended, with the goal to assess the successes and failures of the sites where the rollouts had already been deployed. In October 2017, Madigan Army Medical Center in Takoma, Wash. became the fourth military site to go live with the MHS Genesis EHR system. That deployment followed installations at Fairchild Air Force Base, Naval Health Clinic Oak Harbor and Naval Hospital Bremerton. Madigan was the largest and last of four Pacific Northwest bases that make up the initial phase of the multi-billion-dollar Cerner implementation.
The new EHR system is expected to be deployed at every military medical facility in phases over the next five years.
Indeed, the MHS Genesis rollouts to date have been getting slammed this year, particularly this spring after a Politico report detailed that the first stage of implementations “has been riddled with problems so severe they could have led to patient deaths.” Indeed, some clinicians at one of four pilot centers, Naval Station Bremerton, quit because they were terrified they might hurt patients, or even kill them, the report attested.
Nonetheless, NextGov reported this summer that the Cerner platform was up and running at all four pilot sites. Stacy Cummings, program executive officer for Defense Healthcare Management Systems, said, per that report, that the agency is still troubleshooting the platform at the initial facilities, but the overall adoption’s shown “measurable success.”
And now, according to the Federal Times report, defense planners are “confident that better training and better messaging will lead to fewer conflicts and concerns than they saw in the first wave of rollouts.” The report added, “Military officials and industry partners in the sweeping medical records overhaul insist that most of those concerned expected challenges in adapting military personnel to using a new system, not critical flaws in the multi-year plan to replace legacy records with the updated option.”
The EHR overhaul contract, which was awarded in 2015 to Cerner, Leidos and others, is currently valued at $4.3 billion with a total contract lifecycle value of $9 billion if all options are exercised. But it was recently announced that the contract ceiling will be raised by $1 billion, and that the additional funding will include the Coast Guard in the project.
The four new sites for the deployments will be California’s Naval Health Clinic Lemoore, Travis Air Force Base, Presidio of Monterey and Idaho’s Mountain Home Air Force Base, according to the Federal Times. The report said that Cummings noted “all of the problems that surfaced in that initial testing fell into three categories: users didn’t like the new system; users requested additional improvements; or users found errors in design.”
One of the key lessons learned, according to the report, has been overcoming barriers around workflow changes and learning curves. But now, with training updates and continued support, officials expect things to be smoother. According to the report, “Officials said they’ve already seen patient care improvements at the initial test sites as a result of the new system. Outpatient visits were up 32 percent in the first half of the year as appointment efficiency improved. Hospital staffers estimated more than 2,300 duplicate lab orders were eliminated.”
In May, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) finally inked its own contract with Cerner to overhaul and modernize the department’s aging EHR system, called VistA. VA, which signed the $10 billion contract nearly a year after announcing that it would be going with Cerner, will be adopting the same platform as the DoD.
