“The Defense Health Agency said it is continuing to take over the military services’ hospitals and clinics despite concerns from the leaders of the branches.
DHA put the transition on hold in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“’The pause in Military Health System (MHS) transition let us compile a number of lessons learned,’ Barclay Butler, DHA assistant director for management, said. ‘We then applied those lessons learned to MHS reform. We also used the pause to improve the transition planning, and the transition products.’”
“DHA said those lessons included standardization of military health metrics reporting to the DoD. Previously, each military service reported that information separately to the DoD. DHA has now turned that into a collective system.”
“Butler said that one of the most important results of the past year was the confirmation that the DHA is progressing in the right direction with the market model. That model rearranges how family members and retirees can use treatment facilities. Some facilities would take on more of those patients, while about 200,000 others would be forced to find care in the private sector.”
“’The services asked the defense secretary to re-asses the approach and the secretary took that information and made a decision on the 9th of November to continue forward with our plan,’ Butler said…”
“Congress also wants to push forward with the plan. It is heeding the advice of the military services, however. While the transition started in 2018 and was supposed to originally only take a couple years, lawmakers pushed the deadline to 2022 out of caution.”
“In the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, lawmakers pushed the processes all the way out to 2025…” Read the full article here.
Source: DoD stands up permanent program to give vendors access to top-tier secrets – By Scott Maucione and Jared Serbu, January 11, 2021. Federal News Network.
