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

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.

Comments

A consortium of Cerner, Leidos and Accenture

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus Christ what a waste of money and to the worst possible people.

Re:A consortium of Cerner, Leidos and Accenture

[arglebargle_xiv]

A large-scale medical records system, a multibillion-dollar IT project, and companies like Accenture doing it, it's like combining herpes, syphillis, and gonorrhea and hoping you'll get a cure for cancer. Any of of those in isolation is pretty much pre-ordained to fail, and they're combing them all into one massive clusterfsck... why don't they just declare failure in advance and save the years of effort (and money).

$4.3 billion == guaranteed failure.

[serviscope_minor]

As far as I can tell, any IT project costing a billion or more is 100% guaranteed to fail.

Also, it sounds like they decided to source IT from Lufier, Mephistopheles and Satan, which incidentally also guarantees it to fail.

Re:$4.3 billion == guaranteed failure.

[dinfinity]

As far as I can tell, any IT project costing a billion or more is 100% guaranteed to fail.

No kidding.

If you pay everybody $200 000 per year, that equates to 21 500 man-years (!) of work. I don't know what kind of problems in record keeping they're going to solve, but for that kind of money it'd better involve employees doing that in gold plated jets flown by an artificially engineered unicorn that continually snorts prime-grade cocaine.

Re:Trading one for the other

[phantomfive]

Regardless of whether they are starting with open source software, or closed source software........if I ever paid $4.3 billion for some software, I guarantee I would be getting the source for it. If the government pays that much for a system, one of the requirements should be that it ends up open source.

VistA is a nightmare

[Gravis Zero]

i was interested in VistA and what all the fuss was about, so i decided to check it out. turns out the backend is nightmare code that would would swear was machine generated. after some investigation i found out it's MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) code. a lot of useful stuff started way back in the 1970s... but MUMPS is a 1960s nightmare come to life.

think i'm exagerating? here's a module from VistA's code which was apparently updated in 1989.

DENTA1 ;ISC2/SAW,HAG-DENTAL TREATMENT DATA SERVICE REPORTS ; 1/10/89 11:08 AM ; ;;1.2;DENTAL;**24**;JAN 26, 1989
  D:'$D(DT) DT^DICRW S %O="OPT",U="^",S=";",O=$T(@(%O)),DENTV=$$VERSION^XPDUTL("DENT") I $D(^DOPT($P(O,S,5),"VERSION")),(DENTV=^DOPT($P(O,S,5),"VERSION")) G IN
  K ^DOPT($P(O,S,5))
  F I=1:1 Q:$T(@(%O)+I)="" S ^DOPT($P(O,S,5),I,0)=$P($T(@(%O)+I),S,3),^DOPT($P(O,S,5),"B",$P($P($T(@(%O)+I),S,3),"^",1),I)=""
  S K=I-1,^DOPT($P(O,S,5),0)=$P(O,S,4)_U_1_U_K_U_K K I,K,X S ^DOPT($P(O,S,5),"VERSION")=DENTV
IN I $P(O,S,6)'="" D @($P(O,S,6))
PR S O=$T(@(%O)),S=";" S IOP=$I D ^%ZIS W:IOST'["PK-" @IOF K IOP
  I $P(O,S,7)'="" D @($P(O,S,7))
  E W !!,$P(O,S,3),":",!,$$VERSION^XPDUTL("DENT")," ",$P($T(+1),S,1),!!,$P(O,S,4),"S:",!
  F J=1:1 Q:'$D(^DOPT($P(O,S,5),J,0)) S K=$S(J0 S Z2=Z1
  G:Z3=0 W I Z3>1 S DIC="^DENT(225,",DIC(0)="AEMNQ",DIC("A")="Select STATION.DIVISION: " S:$D(DENTSTA) DIC("B")=$S(DENTSTA[" ":+DENTSTA,1:DENTSTA) D ^DIC Q:Y