Last week, the Department of Defense awarded its EHR modernization contract to a team that includes Cerner, Leidos and Accenture, though much of the industry appears to have little faith that the contract and project will succeed.
In an opinion piece in U.S. News & World Report, Niam Yaraghi, PhD, a fellow in the Brookings Institution's Center for Technology Innovation, warns Cerner and its team that they should prepare for failure, saying the government's track record with IT projects is infamously poor.
"The botched rollout of HealthCare.gov was not a standalone exception; it was a typical example of how most of the large IT projects are managed by the federal government," he wrote. Dr. Yaraghi then cited statistics from The Standish Group that found just 6 percent of federal IT projects with more than $10 million in labor costs were successful between 2003 and 2012. Forty-two percent of federal IT projects with at least $10 million in labor costs were abandoned or restarted.
A key goal of the DOD contract is to achieve interoperability between the DOD and the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as with the civilian healthcare environment. Dr. Yaraghi suggests that achieving interoperability is not a question of whether Cerner can deliver it, as interoperability is not a technical issue but a political and economic one. "There is only so much the Cerner team can do to make sure that the technical capability to exchange medical information is in place; how others decide to use these functionalities is out of Cerner's control," he wrote.
However, Dr. Yaraghi said the private healthcare sector is watching the developments closely, as interoperability is also the biggest challenge in its health IT community, so it has a lot to learn. "The Cerner team is now assigned with the 'mission impossible' of finding a solution to the problem we have not been able to solve — even after a decade of discussions and $28 billion of incentives from the HITECH Act," he wrote. "Whatever the Cerner team does should be reported to the community. The success or failure of this project, if correctly and adequately documented, will be a priceless learning experience for the entire health IT sector."
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