LASTING LEGACY

Migrating, Archiving, and Maintaining DOD Healthcare Data

THE CHALLENGE

Migrate, Store, and Analyze the DoD’s Critical Healthcare Information

Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Atlantic is a Navy engineering and IT command tasked with delivering information warfare solutions that protect national security. The Defense Healthcare Management Systems (DHMS) Program Executive Office (PEO) is part of the Military Healthcare System (MHS) responsible for supporting the delivery of healthcare to the Department of Defense (DoD) community.

Recently, DHMS PEO partnered with NIWC Atlantic to develop and implement a solution for migrating and archiving critical healthcare data as part of a larger modernization effort. As the DHMS PEO set out to deploy a new electronic health record (EHR) system, MHS GENESIS, it needed a way to maintain healthcare data in tandem with the new system’s deployment and legacy system’s retirement.

NIWC Atlantic used the Information Warfare Research Project (IWRP) as a means of interacting with a broad consortium of experts who could help identify, prototype, and test solutions. This led to a partnership with ECS to assist in:

Solution integration.
Migrating and archiving the legacy data.
Ensuring the data remained accessible for critical healthcare, legal, and analytical requirements.

PROJECT GOALS

Decommission

100

sites

Consolidate

150

of legacy data

Store

patient records

THE SOLUTION

A Process-based Approach to Data Consolidation

Leveraging a commercial off-the-shelf solution from our partner Mediquant, ECS built a legacy data consolidation solution (LDCS) known as the Health Information Archive (HIA). The HIA enables NIWC Atlantic to meet the PEO DHMS requirement to retain all legacy data from source systems for long-term archival and retrieval.

ECS experts created a system that can perform extract, transform, and load functions to map the data into a common model across all legacy systems, enabling it to be read by MHS GENESIS. The new HIA also supports critical use cases such as:

Research, analytics, and reporting
Clinical point of care

Legal medical record
User interfacing with other DHA and DoD systems

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190823-N-IA905-1017
SANTA MARTA, Colombia (Aug. 23, 2019) A Colombian army helicopter flies alongside the hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20) off the coast of Santa Marta, Colombia during a formation flight with the Dragon Whales of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 28, Aug. 23, 2019. Comfort is working with health and government partners in Central America, South America and the Caribbean to provide care on the ship and at land-based medical sites, helping to relieve pressure on national medical systems strained by an increase in Venezuelan migrants. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Morgan K. Nall/Released)

THE RESULTS

A Powerful Solution Integrated Into DHA Healthcare Infrastructure

ECS was able to deploy a cloud-native solution that will provide a secure and active health data repository for DHA’s legacy clinical systems. Given the success of the project, NIWC recently added new data pipelines and capabilities, expanding the project beyond its initial operational capabilities. With the new LDCS, ECS is able to provide direct access to a single source of a patient’s historical medical records and make better decisions around the health and security of our nation’s warfighters.