LogicaCMG to supply armed forces with EHRs by 2010

News

27 April 2006

December 1, 2016

LogicaCMG has won the £80m contract to fully supply the armed services with electronic health records by 2010, following a four year procurement process.

The Defence Medical Information Capability Programme (DMICP) will start piloting at the end of the year and officials expect the first implementations of EHRs for military personnel and their families in 2008.

Lieutenant Commander David Williams, army GP and clinical policy advisor for the programme, told assembled journalists at a press conference at the MOD: "I’m very excited. I’m a future user. DMCIP is going to be an outstanding solution and provide to us the system we need to take forward defence healthcare in the next 10-15 years."

Colonel Mike Manson, assistant director of medical information management for the Defence Medical Services department, added: "The interface with the NHS is an important part of this programme."

"The record will provide a complete life record from cradle through to retirement from the forces," he said. "Once we make the link to the NHS system we will be able to input the record from the records of the GP and we will be able to export that back to the GP on retirement." This will be using GP2GP transfer when it becomes available.

An electronic link between the military and an NHS laboratory is already being tested, with pilots planned, later this year, of the National electronic Library for Health and with Choose and Book.

DMICP will be expected to operate in several clinical settings, such as in first aid posts, medical facilities in barracks, and in field hospitals, and everywhere in the world where UK forces are deployed. The Integrated Health Record will be held on a central database in South Wales, explained Colonel Manson, and will be updatable internationally.

Around 250,000 records will be held on the system, which will be used by 7,000 defence medical staff and 3,000 reservists.

The record will feature primary and secondary care records, mental and occupational health, and dental records as well. The DMICP system will run using an adapted version EMIS PCS with a specially-written dental administration and health record module, replacing the older EMIS LV which is not networked centrally.

The system will run on the Defence Information Infrastructure, a separate project to bring greater bandwidth and connectivity to military personnel both at home and abroad. "Some users will get to the system in existing networks but eventually eveyrbody will get to it through DII," said Colonel Manson. DMICP was not dependent on DII, he said.

One development is that injured military personnel in the field will be given chips, similar to those used by digital cameras, containing their medical records, so updating records would not have to depend on connection to the central server, said Colonel Manson. "In a situation where we do have full connection right out to the front line, treatment takes place, that treatment is recorded and transmitted back through a satellite link back to the UK.

"If the connections are not readily available, then in any case the casualty will be issued with a personal information chip – a small chip, on a dog tag or on their wrists. That will move with the casualty and will be through the casulty everywhere in the system, until such point where connections are available, and then the information on the chip will be sent to the central database."

In the field, specially toughened handheld computers using the US Army’s BMIS-T system (above) will be used to record personnel injuries. The EMIS system has been adapted to read the data taken on the handhelds and integrate it seamlessly into the electronic record.

It will also be possible to query anonymised records easily, to generate statistics about the general health of the armed forces from the system, either on a local basis to check the general fitness of personnel or on a wider scale to spot any ongoing trends.

Lieutenant Commander Williams said that the two main benefits from the DMICP would be improved management and morale among the defence medical services, added that a culture change and a change of business process was also necessary for the success of the project.

"The aim is to introduce standand processes across the defence medical services that doctors and dentists are prepared to use," said Richard Williams, programme director of the DMCIP.

The managing director of LogicaCMG’s space and defence division, Joe Hemming, said on the contract win: "This latest win for LogicaCMG plays directly to our strengths and leverages our systems integration and design heritage with our business services capability.

"We successfully demonstrated to the MOD our in-depth understanding of health systems gained through programmes such as the NHS care records service and service delivery to UCLH [University College London Hospital]."