>>8466242
It was a targeting message. Someone also attacked the HHS network a couple of days ago.
Cerner data center to support DoD and VA EHRs
https://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/cerner-data-center-to-support-dod-and-va-ehrs
By Greg Slabodkin
November 17, 2017, 7:24 a.m. EST
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As the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs look to create a common shared electronic health record system, the VA is poised to benefit from DoD investments in a Cerner data center that currently hosts the military’s new EHR.
DoD’s system—called MHS GENESIS—leverages the Cerner Millennium platform, as will the VA’s EHR after the agency concludes contract negotiations with the vendor later this month, creating a lifetime health record that will facilitate the transition of active duty military members to veteran status.
According to Stacy Cummings, program executive officer for Defense Healthcare Management Systems, the two agencies will share a data center hosted at Cerner’s Kansas City headquarters in which “both DoD and VA data will reside in a single platform.” Cummings said the VA will take advantage of DoD’s investments in the commercial data center.
“Part of the leverage that VA is getting by their choice to use this very same system is they avoid the investment, cost and the time” that DoD has already put into the initial operating capability phase of MHS GENESIS, says Jerry Hogge, senior vice president at Leidos Defense Health.
In 2015, DoD awarded a $4.3 billion contract to prime contractor Leidos to modernize the military’s EHR system. The Leidos-led team includes consultancy Accenture, dental software vendor Henry Schein and Cerner, which provides the core Millennium capability as a software-as-a-service hosted in the vendor’s data center.
The DoD contract with Leidos includes several services, including hosting MHS GENESIS in a separate enclave, incorporating significant cybersecurity enhancements to protect the data, as well as physical and virtual separation from commercial clients.
DoD modified its contract with Leidos in 2015 to meet EHR hosting requirements that the military said could only be met by a data center owned and operated by Cerner.
“It was a design feature of the original contract, where the government left open its hosting choice,” recounts Hogge. “It could have been a public service like Amazon Web Services, or a (Defense Information Systems Agency) mega center, or it could have been the winner of the contract—in this case Cerner—to provide hosting services. The customer allowed for that choice to be made.”
However, according to DoD, Cerner’s data center enables direct access to the vendor’s proprietary data that would otherwise not be possible in a government-hosted environment.
“The proprietary data consists of quantitative models and strategies which are the result of extensive Cerner-funded research and development efforts conducted over 15 years,” contends the military. “The models are based on analysis of clinical, operational, and financial data associated and incorporate vast amounts of actual longitudinal patient data and information collected through other Cerner applications.”