Cerner: 5 updates on DOD's EHR rollout

Travis Dalton, a senior vice president and general manager at Cerner, provided an update Feb. 28 on the U.S. Department of Defense's EHR rollout.

The DOD's rollout of a Cerner EHR follows a "wave model," in which the system — called MHS Genesis — will replace the agency's legacy healthcare systems across three continental U.S. regions and two regions overseas through 2022. The first wave of facilities to integrate MHS Genesis, located in the Pacific Northwest, began the transition Feb. 7, 2017, when the DOD implemented MHS Genesis at Fairchild Air Force Base outside Spokane, Wash.

Here are five things to know about the DOD's MHS Genesis implementation.

1. In the year since Fairchild Airforce Base went live on MHS Genesis, the facility has achieved stage 6 on the eight-stage HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model, which measures the degree to which a hospital or health system uses its EMR functions. Twenty-two percent of U.S. outpatient facilities have reached stage 6, which represents the second-highest designation.

2. The next three sites to go live on MHS Genesis were Naval Hospital Oak Harbor and Naval Hospital Bremerton, both based in Washington state. Tacoma, Wash.-based Madigan Army Medical Center, which went live on the Cerner EHR in October 2017, marked the fourth and final pilot site for the project.

3. The pilot facilities now have access to clinical decision support, care management, data analytics and clinical intelligence functionalities they did not have through their legacy EHR system, Mr. Dalton wrote. He added within the first four months of going live on MHS Genesis, Madigan Army Medical Center reported its average length of stay for patients with sepsis dropped 37 percent.

4. The DOD's MHS Genesis rollout is in the midst of a "planned optimization phase," during which Cerner officials are working with Leidos, Accenture and the DOD to "retrain, assist with change management, answer questions, address workflow where appropriate and resolve issues" among pilot facilities that are live on the EHR, according to Mr. Dalton.

5. Leidos, Cerner and Accenture, which were awarded the $4.3 billion DOD contract in July 2015, are working to refine some early adoption issues.

"As can be expected with any large-scale change, there have been challenges," Mr. Dalton wrote. "Some early adoption issues mean that change management and governance processes are being refined. Some issues logged have taken longer to resolve than we would have liked, and productivity at the local level has taken some time to normalize. Although we seek ideal outcomes, we also know how complex this type of delivery can be. "

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