Integrated Health Record Tests DoD's Agile Acquisition Aspirations

...Complete record interoperability between the VA and Defense has been a holy grail of sorts for years. The current effort started with a handshake agreement between the two departments' secretaries in early 2011. A year later, Dr. Barclay Butler was appointed to direct the Interagency Program Office (IPO) that will coordinate DoD and VA's activities. And he's come to the conclusion that development of the Integrated Electronic Health Record (iEHR) just isn't compatible with the traditional DoD acquisition system.

"In that waterfall approach, requirements are fixed. The difficulty we have is that the innovation cycle within health care IT is so short that these requirements corrode quite quickly," Butler told AFCEA's annual Warfighter Support IT day this week. "If we were to develop this system a year after the requirements were developed, the program manager would say 'I developed the system that the requirements told me to develop.' The tester would say 'I tested the requirements, they all work.' Then the actual clinician would say, 'I don't like this system. It doesn't do what I need."...

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and VA Secretary Eric Shinseki have taken a personal interest in the iEHR. Butler said that's added a lot of momentum to their work, but it's also set up some tough challenges...Butler said that's one more reason the effort will require agile development, something he said VA's IT community has already embraced through its Project Management Accountability System. The Pentagon has had less success with its Business Capability Lifecycle model, which tries to adapt DoD's existing acquisition strictures to the rapid pace of IT change...