Leidos Brings DoD MHS GENESIS EHR to East Coast in Double-Wave Deployment

The Leidos Partnership for Defense Health (LPDH) has deployed the MHS GENESIS EHR to an additional 12,000 clinicians and providers as part of its latest double-wave deployment.

Waves PORTSMOUTH/DRUM spanned 11 parent Military Treatment Facilities (MTFs) in Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Virginia.

"With each deployment, our team is continuing to expand both scalability and capacity," Liz Porter, Leidos Health Group president, said in a public statement. "We will continue to roll out new capabilities to meet customer demand."

LPDH developed MHS GENESIS, the Military Health System's new EHR, and has given program management and technical expertise to the Program Executive Office Defense Healthcare Management Systems (PEO DHMS) since 2015.

MHS GENESIS is the centerpiece of a larger transformation to standardize, integrate, and manage health data across the DoD and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

The EHR platform is operational at over 2,200 locations and reaches 6.1 million DOD beneficiaries.

DoD is deploying MHS GENESIS across the continental US and overseas through a total of 23 waves, with each wave targeting a different region. Officials said that this approach enables the DOD to take full advantage of lessons learned from prior waves to maximize subsequent deployments.

"The program continues to operate on schedule, and we are expecting to complete all CONUS MTF deployments by the end of this calendar year," said Holly Joers, PEO DHMS. "MHS GENESIS successfully leverages commercial best practices improving clinical outcomes with each deployment."

While the system deployment remains on schedule, at the end of last month, a system update to the MHS GENESIS platform caused an EHR slowdown at multiple VA medical facilities.

Modifications made by the DOD to the EHR system "had the unintended consequence of interrupting services that provide connectivity to the network," Terrence Hayes, VA press secretary, confirmed in a statement.

During the slowdown, Oracle Cerner EHR users experienced "long intervals" for the next screen each time users clicked a button in the system.

The challenges increased clinician stress; before the performance degradation, EHR users were already struggling with EHR challenges that limited patient care access.

Alongside VA medical facilities, over 50 percent of all MHS providers and nearly every medical facility using the system were affected.

Several "configuration changes" were made to fix the slowdown. Additionally, Terrence Hayes, VA press secretary, confirmed in a statement that the VA would "continue to monitor the system and user feedback to confirm the lag is fixed."

Last week, GOP legislators proposed two bills that would substantially amend the Oracle Cerner EHR system or scrap the project completely.

According to reporting from FedScoop, House Democrats are working on plans to reform the VA EHR modernization program.

Two senior congressional sources told the news outlet that a new bill from Democrats on the House VA Committee aims to provide a comprehensive solution for problems with the VA EHR system.