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DoD Ditches Open Source Medical Records System In $4.3B Contract

Posted by samzenpus on from the changing-things-up dept.

dmr001 writes: The US Department of Defense opted not to use the Department of Veterans Affairs' open source VistA electronic health record system in its project to overhaul its legacy systems, instead opting for a consortium of Cerner, Leidos and Accenture. The initial $4.3 billion implementation is expected to be the first part of a $9 billion dollar project. The Under Secretary for Acquisition stated they wanted a system with minimum modifications and interoperability with private sector systems, though much of what passes for inter-vendor operability in the marketplace is more aspirational than operable. The DoD aims to start implementation at 8 sites in the Pacific Northwest by the end of 2016, noting that "legacy systems are eating us alive in terms of support and maintenance," consuming 95% of the Military Health Systems IT budget.

3 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. UK NHS by martin · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sounds alot like the disasterous Nhs epr systems. After 20 years weve had progress but the number suppliers is down 1 and a major cash sinkhole

  2. Accenture? by msobkow · · Score: 3, Informative

    Accenture? Better double that initial estimate to $18 billion, and count on it rising further. :(

    --
    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
  3. Re:A consortium of Cerner, Leidos and Accenture by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    You obviously don't know anything about MUMPS.

    I'll just discuss these specific points:
    - It *is* a database.
    - The "multidimensional array" is some sort of b-tree, the same kind of approach that is used by an RDBMS.
    - The language is dynamically typed ("no ints or floats"), which in practice means it's like working in Python or Perl. Internally, numerical data is stored in a numerical format for efficiency.
    - There's no need for reserved names, that's correct. Nonetheless, coding practices dictate that you don't name a variable "if" or something silly like that.
    - There is a schema.
    - Yes, a "global array" is a database object so of course it's stored to disk.
    - "All program code is stored and executed within the global array alongside production data." It's stored in a specific location (outside the database schema) that's dedicated to program code. These are basically stored procedures. I imagine every database you're familiar with also keeps its stores procedures in the database.

    I could educate you more thoroughly, but it would be a waste of my time.