Dive Brief:
- After much public jockeying for position, it's come down to this: Four groups of health IT vendors have submitted bids on the Department of Defense's $11-billion Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization contract.
- Groups submitting bids for the massive DoD contract include a partnership between EMR vendor Epic Systems and IBM; a team including defense contractor and systems integrator Computer Sciences Corp., Hewlett Packard and EMR vendor Allscripts; a group including EMR vendor Cerner, government systems integrator Leidos and Accenture Federal; and another group that includes PricewaterhouseCoopers, General Dynamics Information Technology and MedSphere.
- Bids on the new system, which will replace several large components of the military healthcare platform, will be evaluated by a group of DoD civilians, military personnel and subject matter and procurement experts. DoD leaders expect to make a decision on the contract by July 2015.
Dive Insight:
If the group which includes MedSphere is chosen, things will go much differently than they will if any of the other groups are chosen to build out the project. That team will implement a commercial version of the VA's own VistA open source EMR, a solution which was originally designed for military use. While it's difficult to say how much the open source solution would cost the DoD, it seems likely that it would be cheaper to roll out. (OpenVista has cost hospitals as little as one-tenth of what it would cost to implement standard commercial EMRs, according to Politico.)
However, the DoD has not proven itself to be deft at managing healthcare IT selection process, to say the least. It's hard to say how much the cost of the hugely expensive products from Cerner, Allscripts and Epic will be taken into account when the panel making decisions on the bids considers its options. After all, VistA has been available for a while before the current bidding process began, and DoD didn't choose to use it despite its excellent reputation. In other words, though it arguably shouldn't be, this one could be a cliffhanger.