ECS Tapped to Modernize Health IT Infrastructure for Military
Naval Information Warfare Center awarded ECS $116 million to support health IT infrastructure upgrades across the Military Health System.
Source: Thinkstock
By The Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Defense Health Information Technology Division recently awarded a four-year $116 million contract to ECS to lead health IT infrastructure modernization project, according to a new press release.
ESC will conduct the transition of the legacy health IT infrastructure to the new system, known as MedCOI (the medical community of interest), while confronting complicated privacy and cybersecurity concerns.
“As ECS continues to innovate within the areas of the infrastructure service and health information technology, we look forward to serving NIWC and DHA in this critical modernization endeavor,” George Wilson, president of ECS, said in the press release.
The company will provide Desktop to Datacenter (D2D) IT modernization and cybersecurity solutions to the Defense Health Agency (DHA) and other federal health IT customers, the press release stated. DHA will host a new, integrated IT environment for the Military Health System (MHS) as it transitions to a modern electronic health record system called MHS GENESIS.
“We are honored to lead the implementation of the D2D, which will support US military members and their dependents worldwide,” Jim Kier, ECS’ senior vice president for cyber solutions and digital modernization, stated in the press release. “ECS has been integral in the design, development, and fielding of DHA’s Desktop to Datacenter transformation initiatives.”
The health IT infrastructure modernization project is expected to bring significantly greater efficiency, ease, and access for the nation’s more than 9.4 active duty personnel, military retirees, and military families who are seeking medical care in the US military treatment facilities around the world, according to the press release.
“We are proud to support this next phase of modernization for military healthcare,” Kier expressed.
The DoD is concentrating on three areas in improving its healthcare IT infrastructure to prepare for application of its new Cerner-based MHS GENESIS system, including wide area network infrastructure, medical device cybersecurity, and enterprise services architecture, explained the DoD in a January 2019 release.
“Our efforts to upgrade the infrastructure primarily concentrate on wide area network infrastructure, which include the circuits and the amount of bandwidth being provided to the facility,” Tom Hines, chief architect for networks and security at the DHA, said in a statement. ”Previously, we did not necessarily have redundant communication infrastructure supporting all of our medical treatment facilities. That is a change we are making with this implementation since it is based upon deployment to a central data center; that obviously has to be very robust.”
MHS GENESIS is expected to support more than 9.5 million DoD beneficiaries and 205,000 military health system personnel and will replace legacy DoD EHR systems, including the Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application, the Composite Health Care System, and components of the Theater Medical Information Program-Joint.
MHS GENESIS deployment will occur over a total of 23 waves, including three in the continental US and two oversees. Each wave will last about a year, and comprise an average of three hospitals and 15 locations.
