DoD MHS GENESIS EHR Implementation Set to Hit Halfway Mark in 2022

The Department of Defense’s (DoD) EHR implementation, MHS GENESIS, will be live in more than half of all military hospitals and clinics in 2022, according to reporting from the Fort Hood Sentinel.

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

Lt. Gen. Ronald Place, MD, director of the Defense Health Agency (DHA), highlighted the implementation’s progress among the agency’s “top six points of pride” for 2021.

“I am immensely proud of the collective work across the entire Military Health System to continue deploying MHS GENESIS during the pandemic,” Place told the Fort Hood Sentinel.

“It is much more than a single electronic health record that stays with a patient during their entire life cycle in the MHS and VA,” he added. “It is transformative by design to help us improve patient safety, communication and ultimately better health outcomes.”

In September, MHS GENESIS deployed to Wave TRIPLER which included five military hospitals and clinics in Hawaii, including Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu.

Holly Joers, program executive officer for the Defense Healthcare Management Systems office, which oversees the implementation, said that Wave TRIPLER was the “most successful wave deployment of MHS GENESIS to date.”

Col. Kevin Peck, CIO at Tripler Army Medical Center said that the EHR deployment at Tripler was a success because of teamwork, communication, and planning.

“Our success was driven by the foresight of our chief technology officer to allocate travel funds in the budget for fiscal year 2020,” Peck said.

These funds allowed Tripler’s health IT staff to visit medical facilities that had already gone-live on the system to learn best practices for implementation. The facilities included: Naval Medical Center in San Diego, California; Carson Tahoe Regional Medical Center in Carson City, Nevada; and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Peck emphasized the importance of open communication between Tripler leaders and staff for the EHR implementation.

“We leveraged leadership as needed and proactively informed the staff of all changes to ensure they remained flexible and positive,” he said.

Overall, DHA deployed three successful waves in 2021, including 30 military hospitals and clinics.

“Currently, MHS GENESIS has been deployed at 47 MTF commands, which includes 64,000 active users and represents 35% of the Department of Defense deployment,” said Air Force Col. Thomas Cantilina, MD, the DHA’s chief health informatics officer and deputy functional champion for the EHR system.

Cantilina said that MHS GENESIS supported patient and agency needs in response to COVID-19 by providing military leaders with real-time data about the DHA’s capacity to take on new patients from an enterprise level.

“DHA health informaticists added approximately 40 new system functions to MHS GENESIS, enabling providers to better address the needs of patients with presumptive positive cases of COVID-19,” Cantilina said.

DHA also added several systems to support MHS GENESIS, including a file-sharing protocol that supports a secure email interface to comply with HIPAA.

The agency also added the MHS Video Connect feature, which is a platform that supports virtual video visits between MHS patients and providers.

In 2022, Cantilina said the DHA plans to deploy MHS GENESIS at another 10 waves, including 54 additional military hospitals and clinics.