“Health record modernization projects at the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs that include upwards of $20 billion in contract spending are getting new joint oversight under a provision in must-pass 2020 defense bill.”
“The provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, which the House of Representatives passed on Dec. 11, reconfigures the existing DOD-VA Interagency Program Office to serve as a hub for interoperability and management issues as the two agencies progress in separate but linked implementations of commercial health records systems based on the Cerner Millennium software.”
“The IPO was initially established in the 2008 NDAA to oversee electronic health record interoperability and has since been reconfigured several times. It was the home base for a product called the Joint Legacy Viewer, which served as a read-only interface between legacy DOD and VA systems.”
‘This latest rewrite puts the IPO in a prominent perch to make sure the DOD and VA’s Cerner-based systems essentially operate as a single product while also looking to expand interoperability with other electronic health record systems…”
“Lawmakers on the House Veterans Affairs Committee also pushed NDAA amendments to formalize a new entity called Federal Electronic Health Record Management…” Read the full article here.
Source: NDAA redesigns oversight of $20B in health record modernization – By Adam Mazmanian, December 11, 2019. FCW.
