The U.S. Coast Guard has announced that it would be joining the Department of Defense on its Cerner EHR project. The move is being made to transition the patient records of its clinics and service members to the Department of Defense’s MHS Genesis platform.
It has been revealed that the Coast Guard’s EHR needs will be added to the DoD’s $4.3 billion contract with Leidos. There wouldn’t be any signing of a direct contract with Cerner. This is completely opposite to the Department of Veterans Affairs plan of directly contracting the vendor.
DoD officials claim that they are not sure whether the contract ceiling will be raised to cater to the Coast Guard’s requirements. According to Coast Guard’s Acquisition Programs Director Rear Adm. Michael Johnston, the Coast Guard is about 6 percent the size of DoD. He said that the Coast Guard will integrate its launch into the DoD’s deployment schedule because this will allow It to lean on those lessons to ensure success. Despite the fact that there is no timeline related to the launch, Coast Guard officials estimate that the deployment will happen in a fraction of the time compared to the DoD.
“They already have those separate teams that are working on where are those soft spots as far as network and security,” Johnston said, adding, “We’re working with getting those same bodies and those same experts rolled into our CIO shop.”
Genesis Lead Acquisition Official Stacey Cummings said, “We’ll have them deploy to one or two sites like we did, do an evaluation and make sure that the software baseline and the technology, as well as the infrastructure, meet the needs of the users, and our intention would be to enfold them into the deployment strategy as appropriate.”
The partnership will upgrade the Coast Guard from inefficient paper records, which they had been using for nearly three years since their failed contract with Epic, to a quality Healthcare software developed by Cerner. It has been reported that the Coast Guard managed to spend more than $60 million in seven years’ time on the Epic contract, which was never launched.
