The Department of Defense announced plans to begin implementing its Cerner EHR this December, but an audit from the DOD's Office of Inspector General questions the feasibility of that timeline, suggesting the EHR won't be ready to begin implementation by that time.
Stacy Cummings, a Pentagon official overseeing the Defense Healthcare management system Modernization contract, said at the ONC Annual Meeting Tuesday that MHS GENESIS, the name given to the EHR developed by Cerner, Leidos and Accenture, will roll out at sites in the Pacific Northwest by December.
"The DHMSM program mandated execution schedule may not be realistic for meeting the required initial operational capability date of December 2016," according to the audit.
The audit found the EHR implementation go-live is subject to risks and potential delays with developing and testing interfaces to interact with legacy systems, defense against cyberattacks and proper training.
The OIG report asks the DHMSM project leaders to perform further analysis to determine if the December go-live date is still achievable.
The Program Executive Officer for DHMSM neither agrees nor disagrees with the recommendation to perform this analysis. "The program office is confident that it will achieve initial operational capability later this year….However, the Program Executive Officer did not provide documentation to support his statement," according to the audit.
More articles on DHMSM:
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