DoD rolls out Cerner EHR at second military site
Naval Hospital Oak Harbor in Washington State has transitioned to the MHS GENESIS electronic health record from Cerner, the U.S. Department of Defense announced today.
Oak Harbor is the second site to come online as part of the Department of Defense’s initial operating capability program, and the go-live marks a significant milestone as the inpatient components of MHS GENESIS are now officially deployed, wrote Travis Dalton, senior vice president at Cerner, in a Cerner blog post. The first Cerner deployment occurred in February at a clinic at Fairchild Air Force Base.
[Also: DoD says Cerner EHR deployment to reach next milestone in July]
“The integrated system aggregates information into a single EHR, standardized across the branches of the military, to facilitate the safe transition of care across the spectrum of military operations to include garrison, theatre and en route care,” Dalton explained. “At its core, MHS GENESIS is the same commercially available, off-the-shelf electronic medical record that is deployed at thousands of facilities worldwide, operating on one code set.”
Cerner said this creates an integrated and longitudinal patient record and coordination across the continuum of care, regardless of environment, scope and size of military and dental treatment facilities. The ability to integrate and share interoperable patient information with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs health care enterprise and civilian health systems is critical and is inherently built into MHS GENISIS, Dalton added.
Naval Hospital Bremerton and Madigan Army Medical Center, both also in Washington State, are slated for the Leidos-led implementation later in 2017, MHS Genesis program executive officer Stacy Cummings said in a statement.
The DoD has promised the U.S. House appropriations committee it will complete deployment at Madigan Army Medical Center by October. The military will conduct tests once the Cerner system is installed at all four bases. It then will conclude if it’s ready to move forward with the remainder of the $4.3 billion Cerner project, slated for completion in 2022.
The Naval Hospital Oak Harbor go-live marks the debut of certain MHS GENESIS capabilities and applications designed, Cerner said, to improve patient safety and clinical efficiency.
According to Dalton, these include a single integrated record across ambulatory, acute and all other venues in the Oak Harbor medical enterprise; medical device interoperability via Cerner’s CareAware medical device connectivity platform; advanced clinical decision support capabilities; advanced specialty provider workflows and embedded clinical calculators; barcode medication administration; and a labor and maternity-specific module designed to create a new infant record upon barcode scan and treatment plans tailored to mother and child.
The U.S. Department of Defense’s MHS GENESIS project encompasses the replacement of three existing EHRs to create a single patient record. It is interoperable with 24 legacy systems and offers improvements designed to save clinicians and patients time, eliminate paper, and reduce potential medical errors and delays, Dalton wrote.
“It’s also engineered to enable interoperability between the private and public sectors,” he added. “MHS GENESIS is designed so that a record can follow a soldier once they leave active military duty or if they visit a civilian health facility.”
Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com
