From Jim Garrettson, Executive Mosaic President & Founder
News surfaced this week on two of the federal government’s most-watched programs as one agency officially started a competition for a contract and another could be near the end of a contest.
Industry has received the green light to start preparing their bids for a multibillion dollar contract with the Pentagon to build the military’s future electronic health record system.
DoD wants the system to be interoperable with the VA’s EHR platform and to facilitate data sharing between the public and private sectors.
“We are not just buying an off-the-shelf system. We’re really looking to modernize how the department delivers healthcare,” said Christopher Miller, executive officer for the Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization program.
GovCon firms and leaders have anticipated this event for some time and some of the sector’s biggest players join forces with healthcare technology firms to pursue DHMSM, which many leaders pronounce as “dim sum.”
Three teams of contractors have publicly announced their partnerships for DHMSM and Miller previously said in June that he expected at least four teams to form.
In an April conversation with ExecutiveBiz, Mark Jones of CA Technologies offered a glimpse into how he thinks the concept of interoperability could change the nature of the healthcare ecosystem.
“The ecosystem’s only going to get more complicated and complex because that data exchange and interoperability has to take place in order to meet incentives,” said Jones, head of CA’s public sector healthcare vertical.
“The healthcare ecosystem as a whole is going to have more and more data interoperability, which means there’s going to be more need for security.”
Also this week, reports surfaced that NASA will award at least one contract by early September to build a spacecraft to transport U.S. astronauts between Earth and the International Space Station.
NASA will decide the winner — or winners — out of a field that has companies such as Boeing, Sierra Nevada and SpaceX all vying for the chance to help NASA push into the next iteration of space travel.
The selected company — or companies — will be responsible for owning, operating, and developing its own spaceflight system under the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability program.
For more of this week’s headline news in the GovConsector, continue reading below.
