The Department of Defense’s (DoD) EHR office tweeted out this week that the rollout of its new electronic health record system is remaining on schedule, and will deploy later this month at the DOD's Oak Harbor, Washington base.
The EHR system, named MHS Genesis, first rolled out at Fairchild Air Force Baes in Spokane, Washington in February, and will be implemented throughout the military health system by 2022. Initial deployment of the Cerner EHR system was set to begin in December 2016, but the contract was delayed by a few months. Now, everything appears to be right on schedule, according to a recent Politico eHealth report.
Fairchild AFB was the first of four locations in the northwest selected to launch the new system. In the next year, MHS Genesis will deploy at three other military medical facilities in the state of Washington, including Oak Harbor. Officials have said that the plan is to start in the Pacific Northwest and then phase it into the rest of the MHS over the course of several years, which will allow time to tweak it as necessary to meet any changing needs, and identify and correct unanticipated problems early.
In 2015, the Pentagon awarded a $4.3 billion contract to Leidos to modernize DoD’s EHR system. The Leidos-led team includes consultancy Accenture and Cerner to provide the core Millennium capability. According to the Defense Department, MHS Genesis will support the availability of electronic health records for more than 9.4 million DoD beneficiaries and approximately 205,000 MHS personnel globally.
