Defense and VA Eye Commercial System for Managing Medical Tests

The Defense and Veterans Affairs departments have decided to focus on commercial products for a system to track laboratory work such as blood tests within their integrated electronic health record. In a request for information issued Tuesday, the Military Health System asked potential vendors to provide information on developing a lab information capability that includes commercial off-the-shelf products.

VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and Roger Baker, the department’s chief information officer, have backed using open source software for the iEHR, which will cost $4 billion to develop and is slated for deployment in 2017. On June 5, VA issued an RFI for an iEHR pharmacy system based on commercial products.

MHS said it would prefer to host the lab system in a vendor data center and government data centers would be its second choice. A draft blueprint for the iEHR that Nextgov obtained said the future health record data infrastructure will end up as a hybrid of public and private data centers...