Photo By Janice Erdlitz, Lyster Army Health Clinic, Fort Novosel, Alabama ()
MHS GENESIS, the Department of Defense’s new electronic health record, started 2023 by fully deploying across the continental U.S. and ended with successful transitions at nearly every overseas military hospital and clinic in Europe and the Indo-Pacific regionsopens Health.mil article.
By March 2024, MHS GENESIS will be completely deployed at more than 3,000 sites worldwide.
MHS GENESIS provides a single health record for service members, veterans, and their families. MHS GENESIS was developed to replace a patchwork of legacy systems, enhance patient safety, standardize clinical practices, and give patients more digital access to their provider teams. It also replaces the TRICARE Online Patient Portal.
According to a recent Leapfrog evaluation, MHS GENESIS is outperforming the legacy systems when it comes to patient safety and safe medication orderingopens Health.mil article.
Limited fielding for the initial operational capability of MHS GENESIS began in February 2017 at four sites in the Pacific Northwest. Since initial deployment, MHS GENESIS has undergone multiple upgrades, stabilization and adoption changes, and thousands of configuration changes. In September 2019, incremental deployment began and continued through the COVID-19 pandemic.
This year started off with MHS GENESIS reaching 75% of the continental U.S. deployment with its launch of Wave DRUM and Wave PORTSMOUTHopens health.mil articls, spanning New England to the Tidewater region in Virginia.
This was followed by the National Capital Regionopens DVIDS article at the end of March. And on June 3, 2023, the MHS GENESIS roll-outopens health.mil article finished stateside deployment at Wright-Patterson Air Force Baseopens TRICARE.
With this milestone completed, the next chapter was deployment overseas in the fall of 2023.
Sept. 23, 2023, brought the first international deployment of MHS GENESIS, at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germanyopens DVIDS article, and other hospitals and clinics in Germany, England, Spain, Belgium, Greece, Italy, and Turkey following months of preparation and anticipation.
With the end of the MHS GENESIS global deployment nearing, leaders at hospitals and clinics found a much more important need for patient portal championsopens Health.mil article to improve the patient experience at each facility. They serve command and leadership teams at their respective military hospitals and clinics and are liaisons between their site and the patient portal leads at Defense Health Agency.
Wrapping up the year were the successful deployments in Europe and Indo-Pacific regions.
While the new EHR deployed across most of the Pacific Rim, two of the last sites to switch over, Naval Hospital Guam and the Air Force clinic at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, are scheduled for mid-January 2024. They were delayed from the severe impacts of Super Typhoon Mawar at the end of May.
The last medical facility to bring MHS GENESIS online is the James A. Lovell Federal Health Center just north of Chicago, Illinois, in March 2024. Lovell FHCC represents a first-of-its-kind hospital partnership between the VA and DOD, integrating all medical care into a single federal health care facility.
For the DOD, this will then conclude the operational deployment at more than 3,000 U.S. military hospitals and clinics worldwide in just over seven years. It also provides DOD's 9.6 million beneficiaries and 205,000 providers with a single, integrated health record across the continuum of care.
MHS GENESIS Coverage
A sampling of DHA MHS GENESIS coverage efforts in 2023 include:
Photo Caption: MHS GENESIS, the Department of Defense’s new, common electronic health record for the Military Health System replacing the TRICARE Online Patient Portal, is now operational worldwide. In 2023 it met major milestones—completed stateside deployment by June, and in September went live at overseas hospitals and clinics. Four facilities remain and by March 2024, DOD’s incremental deployment plan, that started in September 2019, will be complete.
