The federal Indian Health Service’s health IT modernization effort is expected to begin seeing product demonstrations from qualified vendors this week, according to a letter from IHS to tribal leaders.
The IHS, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, provides a comprehensive health service delivery system for American Indians and Alaska Natives and is the primary source of individual and public healthcare services for 1.6 million of the approximately 2.6 million American Indians and Alaska Natives living near reservations and tribal communities served by the IHS facilities. For many tribal members, IHS is the only source of healthcare.
IHS supports a comprehensive direct and public health service delivery system through a network of hospitals and clinics located in 37 states across the country, largely in extremely rural areas.
Its current EHR, the Resource and Patient Management System (RPMS), was internally developed by IHS, leveraging a decades-long collaboration with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and is certified to the 2015 Edition criteria published by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).
The VA is in the midst of in a multi-year process of rolling out a replacement of its system with a commercial system from Oracle Cerner. IHS is collaborating with the VA/DoD effort to implement lessons learned and best practices. But IHS determined that joining the VA/DoD shared environment was not feasible.
In 2018-19, IHS, in collaboration with HHS, engaged in comprehensive research and analysis of the current state of its HIT infrastructure and options for modernization. In April 2021, after a thorough review, IHS recommended fully replacing the RPMS system over upgrading and renewing it.
The letter to tribal leaders, sent Dec. 16, 2022, by IHS Director Roselyn Tso, noted that a Request for Proposals was released for industry consideration on Aug. 4, 2022, and that the IHS expected to receive final proposals from qualified vendors on Jan. 4, 2023.
One part of the evaluation process will be a series of video demonstrations of the vendors’ products, in the form of representative clinical scenarios. In the letter, the IHS was seeking a wide range of health IT system users from the IHS, Tribal, and Urban Indian Organization sites to participate in and provide input on these demonstrations.
Each vendor will provide recorded demonstrations of how their products support five clinical scenarios:
Scenario 1 – Complicated Outpatient. Demonstration of an ambulatory visit for a complicated outpatient from beginning to end.
Scenario 2 – Uncomplicated Admission. Follow a patient through a brief hospitalization that begins in the Emergency Department and includes a period of Observation.
Scenario 3 – Prenatal Care. Demonstrate those features of the proposed solution that are specific to the delivery of prenatal care services.
Scenario 4 – Well Child Care. Demonstrate those features of the proposed solution that are specific to the delivery of well child care services.
Scenario 5 – Population Health. Demonstrate five use cases where a general user can query the system for specific population information.
The new system's deployment is expected to begin in 2024.
