Electronic health records vendor Cerner will in fact provide data hosting for the Pentagon’s massive Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization, or DHMSM, project.
Department of Defense officials this month denied appeals by groups led by IBM, Computer Sciences Corp., Amazon and General Dynamics, against a $50.7 million no-bid hosting contract to primary contractor Leidos, originally awarded in December.
It was an add-on to the the main, $4.3 billion DHMSM contract that the Leidos-Cerner-Accenture Federal team won in July, beating out competing bids from the likes of IBM and Epic Systems and from CSC and Allscripts Healthcare Solutions. The deal actually could be worth more than $9 billion over a 10-year period.
Per a report in Federal Computer Week, a DoD contracting officer said that Cerner must host the new EHR in its data centers to “enable the full functionality” of the system. DoD also said that “allowing a third party to host or have access to the Cerner proprietary data could adversely impact Cerner’s financial viability and competitive market advantage.”
Interoperability, or lack thereof, was a key concern. The Pentagon said that Cerner “has asserted to the government that it does not allow for connection to [its] managed services by any other commercial entity and that it does not resell these services through any other source.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Notably, according to Federal Computer Week, none of the companies that appealed the add-on contract contested the main DHMSM contract. In addition to IBM and CSC, General Dynamics sought the DHMSM deal in an earlier bidding round.
Photo: Flickr user Virginia Guard Public Affairs
