From the Kansas City Star
Cerner Corp. is part of a team of health information companies that has snagged a coveted multibillion-dollar contract to overhaul the U.S. military’s electronic health records, the Pentagon announced Wednesday.
The victory is a win for Cerner, Kansas City’s fastest-growing large company and one of the top health information technology firms in the country.
Cerner partnered with defense technology contractor Leidos, Accenture Federal Services and Intermountain Healthcare in the bid for the $4.3 billion, 10-year defense contract. The Leidos-led team beat out two other partnerships, one of them including Cerner’s major rival, Epic, a Wisconsin-based health IT firm that also is a leading provider of electronic health records technology.
Cerner and its partners now will be responsible for upgrading the disparate digital medical records of 9.5 million active-duty service members and their families, as well as some veterans, retirees, survivors and members of the National Guard and reserve forces and their dependents. The overhaul will affect 56 hospitals and hundreds of medical and dental clinics in 16 countries.
Cerner declined to comment on Wednesday about winning the contract or whether it would have to increase the size of its already robust workforce in Kansas City. It has 21,000 total employees, and its Kansas City area workforce passed 10,000 employees last year.
Cerner instead referred reporters to a statement by Leidos.
“Our team stands ready to lean forward with the DoD to implement a world class electronic health records system,” the statement said.
The highly prized Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization contract is known as “dim sum” to industry insiders from its acronym, DHMSM.
About $11 billion is budgeted for the project over the next 18 years, but the military predicts the total will end up closer to $9 billion.
Cerner’s annual revenues are about $5 billion, and it would receive only a part of the total contract’s proceeds.
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