The Veteran Affair's electronic health record upgrade may still be on pause, but the Defense Department's Cerner migration is well underway. And the Defense Health Agency is now seeking information about ways it might best manage and migrate data for its MHS Genesis rollout.

The DHA has asked its industry partnership network for help with the massive data migration challenges associated with the DoD's big EHR modernization, which is set to continue in nearly two-dozen waves over the next decade, eventually growing even further in complexity with the addition of the Coast Guard and (presumably) integration with the VA.

As it does, "coordination of reference data tables and mapping of data elements is necessary to ensure consistent and accurate measurement capability and semantic interoperability between component systems through this transformation," according to DHA officials.

[Also: Coast Guard reveals how it will adopt DoD's $4.3 billion Cerner EHR]

As such, it is "interested in learning more about tools to manage the enterprise data management systems for the MHS, and facilitate our ability to meaningfully share data between current systems and the data management systems in our new commercial EHR."

Its existing data systems currently maintain health records for more than 20 million people, DHA officials said. "Much of the data is in standard code sets (ICD9, ICD10, CPT, MEDCIN, etc.) but there are also tables of system specific institutional data."

With the continued expansion of MHS Genesis, and added complexity once the Coast Guard and VA are figured in, the volume and variety of that data will increase substantially in the years ahead.

"As the new EHR generated health data begins to predominate over the next few years, DHA will need reference and metadata management systems able to relate national standard terminology to MHS system usage, and to enable proactive management of measurements from the clinicians' desktop to enterprise dashboard presentation," according to the agency. "The anticipated increase in clinical data from the new EHR, and the need to integrate decades of historical health and business system data, will require a robust enterprise reference and metadata management system."

Contractors can offer submissions, which the agency says will be used as market research as it considers potential acquisition strategies, until May 4.

Specifically, it's looking for enterprise reference and metadata management systems that can incorporate national standard terminology in multiple domains to automate mapping of native terms; support customer-specific reference tables for multiple data domains; highlight impacts of terminology changes on dependent measures and value sets and automate the mappings when national standard code sets are updated, officials said.

The technology should also be able to "interface with Cerner subsystems" – DHA specifically mentions the company's HealtheIntent population health platform – "that may be involved in enterprise data management."

Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com