Defense Health Agency CIO: There’s a very aggressive plan for deployment
While health IT and military pundits alike are waiting with bated breath for the Department of Defense to end speculation and announce the winner of its coveted $11 billion Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization contract, the heavy lifting is just starting for the Defense Health Agency.
The agency, according to CIO David Bowen, currently is in the process of building up infrastructure to handle the electronic health record system on the front end. Following deployment, DHA’s role will be sustainment of the system.
“We’ve got to be the advanced guard,” Bowen told FierceHealthIT. “There’s a very aggressive plan for deployment, and once that’s satisfactory to the military treatment facilities [MTFs], we’ll then pick up sustainment, which will consist of things like continuing educational efforts, making configuration changes and working to deploy subsequent releases of the software.”
In an interview at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s annual conference in Chicago, Bowen also discussed DHA’s ongoing efforts to consolidate health IT services across the Army, Navy and Air Force, as well as cybersecurity and the cloud.
FierceHealthIT: DHA is consolidating health IT services across the Army, Navy and Air Force; how is the transition is going?
David Bowen: The transition is going remarkably well. Two critical areas that you need to focus on when you do these kinds of consolidations are HR and communications.
Regarding HR, we’re putting together Army, Navy, Air Force and the TRICARE Management Activity health plan people, and all of those people are on different performance systems, different evaluation systems and different HR policies. We have to synchronize all of that, as well as fill open positions and establish our leadership positions at the organization. How we do that is very important to the success of the transition. We’ve taken very deliberate steps to ensure, a.) we’re recruiting from inside the organization, and b.) that we give all of our current staff every opportunity to apply for those leadership positions.
Regarding communications, we’ve got a job of communicating to our leadership internally. We’ve also got to do a good job of communicating with our external stakeholders–Congress, the press, the service organizations–and we have to communicate down to the MTFs. The latter is more of a challenge because the separate services run those organizations. We’ve now conducted standing conference calls with the leadership of the organizations to be able to start establishing those communication channels and letting them know what’s coming up.
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