Pentagon Wants a Commercial Electronic Health Record System for Animal Servicemembers

The Defense Department has been moving to commercial cloud-based electronic health records systems over the last several years and is looking to do the same for its four-legged servicemembers.

The Defense Health Agency currently manages a custom-built veterinary EHR, or VEHR, system to care for more than 5,450 working animals and a total of 541,000 patients, including domestic pets. The VEHR handles digital medical records, scheduling, financial management, inventory management and reporting for more than 140 DOD veterinary facilities.

“The VEHR provides an electronic health record as well as the practice management solution to schedule appointments, track and maintain pharmaceutical and supply inventories, real-time collection of money for patient encounters and transactions at time and location of visit, and financial management of monies collected for both working animals and privately owned animals,” according to a request for information seeking market feedback on commercial veterinary EHR solutions.

The department is looking for a new, cloud-based IT product to replace its in-house VEHR running on Oracle 19C/AIX and Windows Server 2016/IIS.

“The end state will be an MHS cloud computing system with secure token authentication—i.e. Common Access Card or soft-cert equivalent—that is client operating system platform agnostic and maintains confidentiality, data integrity, and availability,” the RFI states. “Importantly, the solutions must provide the architectures to enable functional high availability—load balancing, clustering and failover.”

As part of the contract, the vendor will be expected to manage the transition, including extracting, cleaning, loading and validating all legacy data. The product must also be interoperable with other military animal IT systems, including existing pharmaceutical prescription systems, the Air Force’s Working Dog Management System, the Army’s High Processing Computing Centers for animal disease surveillance, and the Pentagon’s Join Pathology Center and Food and Animal Diagnostic Laboratory, as well as the human-focused MHS GENESIS EHR platform being deployed across the military.

The original request for information includes 12 other outcomes DHA will be asking of the winning contractor.

As a military application, the system will also have to meet baseline cybersecurity standards to be hosted on the .mil domain and the non-classified DOD network, NIPRNet.

While the original RFI was issued in 2019, DHA released an updated questionnaire Monday to receive additional market research. The new RFI includes 29 questions for prospective contractors. Responses are due March 29.

DHA officials plan to review product demos during the week of April 12. The virtual sessions will run about 45 minutes, with 10 minutes set aside for questions.