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Case Study: Meeting the Electronic Health Records Technology Needs for the Military Health System |
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Executive Summary
For over 25 years, IBA has provided program management, scheduling, project management, and engineering services to the Military Health System (MHS) Program Offices responsible to the MHS Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) for the design, development, implementation, operations, and maintenance of centralized healthcare information technology solutions.
Client's Challenge
The Defense Health Information Management System (DHIMS) Program Office, formerly the Clinical Information Technology Program Office (CITPO), provides information technology (IT) solutions that seamlessly capture, manage and share healthcare data for the military’s Electronic Health Record (EHR). This includes the EHR capability at military treatment facilities as well as the sharing of healthcare data between the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA).
The organization’s overall objective is to meet the long-term EHR technology needs of the Military Health System. With dozens of projects being undertaken in any given fiscal year to modify and expand the military’s EHR capability, the organization needed an effective solution for planning, monitoring, and managing the continuous EHR enhancement projects.
IBA's Solution
IBA’s solution balances the consistency of organizational-level processes with the responsiveness of self-directed product and project management teams.
IBA developed and implemented the DHIMS project management methodology as a defined and documented approach and set of activities, which assists in the successful management of a software development or integration project. The methodology includes a defined product lifecycle, a project lifecycle (including control gates), a methodology roadmap that outlines the process flows and provides process descriptions, and a methodology toolkit (including tools, templates, checklists, and sample artifacts).
Because the work requires close interaction between Government personnel and the individual IBA product and project teams, the overall support program is executed in a highly collaborative arrangement. A core IBA management and technical team works with the DHIMS Government personnel and otEHR vendor team members to guide the overall product and manage enhancement projects. Today, more than 35 full-time IBA team members support the military’s EHR products and projects.
Conclusion
The development and rollout of large applications, with multiple builds, such as the military’s EHR, engenders high technical and program risk to the Government. The coordination of multiple disciplines to support DHIMS projects at various stages of the DoD lifecycle is complex and labor intensive.
Today, DHIMS relies on IBA’s project management professionals and technical experts to function with up-to-date techniques to manage products and projects effectively. IBA currently provides product management, project management, subject matter expertise, and technical management for the vast majority of DHIMS initiatives.
The DHIMS project management methodology delivered by IBA provides a standard approach and guidelines to ensure that software projects are conducted in a disciplined, well-managed, and consistent manner that promotes the delivery of quality products and results in projects that are completed on time and within budget.
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