$264M VA Scheduling Contract Awarded to Epic and Lockheed Subsidiary

Systems Made Simple, a subsidiary of defense and national security contractor Lockheed Martin, won over a $624 million contract from the Veterans Affairs Department to manage its medical appointment scheduling system at its Veterans Health Administration (VHA) healthcare system. Epic Systems Corporations will be providing the software. The new system will be called MASS and will ideally make scheduling appointments more convenient for veterans. Currently, the Veterans Health Administration healthcare system is composed of 152 hospitals and 900 outpatient clinics across the country.

This new contract is important because of last year’s scandal of VHA employees falsifying records about wait times for veterans to receive clinical care, in order to meet VA performance and bonus pay metrics. An internal audit found that 57,000 new VA patients that needed appointments waited up to 3 months.

Lockheed is well known for its missile systems and fighter jets, but recently announced that it is teaming up with Intel, Cisco, Cloudera, and Montgomery College to form the Lockheed Martin Healthcare Technology Alliance to develop health information technologies for patient care, public health and research. 

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