Thanks to a contract modification, military health records can now be stored in Cerner's data centers rather than government data centers.

The federal government awarded the $4.3 billion Department of Defense contract to the Leidos/Cerner/Accenture team to overhaul the military's health records. 

The new contract was posted Dec. 18 on FedBizOpps.gov, a site where federal agencies can post business opportunities and commercial vendors can search for them. The notice was posted by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, which supports the Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization (DHMSM) Program office.

"While [the] Leidos solution meets the contract requirements, many of the capabilities of the DHMSM EHR cannot be fully realized unless they are hosted in the Cerner environment," according to the notice. "In order to fully enable these functionalities, the DHMSM EHR requires direct access to proprietary Cerner data, which is only available within Cerner-owned and operated data centers."

Proprietary Cerner data include models based on clinical, operational and financial data that have been developed by analyzing patient data and information from other Cerner applications. Because of the sources of the data and tools found in the Cerner solution, the notice says no other contractor can provide this functionality. It also explains that the government could not have anticipated this need which is why it wasn't included in the original request for proposals.