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Washington Prowler
Obama’s Chicago Pentagon
Why spend $15 million when you can spend $15 billion on the same thing?
One of the key planks to President Barack Obama’s health care reform plan is already being held up by an Inspector General investigation into whether leaked internal government emails might have been used to sway influence for a government contract, according to Congressional and Defense Department sources.
In April, the White House and the U.S. Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration announced plans for a pilot program many in the White House and on Capitol Hill believed would lead to a national model for “virtual” medical records. A number of respected health care experts believe such “paperless” records would reduce medical errors, as well as cut health care expenses annually be tens of billions of dollars, two reasons the Obama Administration took an interest in the DOD project.
The DOD Joint Virtual Lifetime Electronic Records System (JVLERS) would have ensured that health care records for military personnel would be available to health care professionals — whether on the battlefield or in a VA treatment facility — throughout the patients’ lifetime in a secure and private database. The program to develop this interoperable system had been funded to the tune of over $10 billion over the past 10 years, most of the money going to Northrop Grumman and SAIC, but the program had stalled out.
But earlier this year, a small firm called Adara Networks was asked to do a presentation at the Pentagon on how it had built a similar database system in nine months and for about $10 million. “Given that other contractors we’d had extensive experience with had tried to do the same thing over the past decade at a cost of about $10 billion, we were shocked,” says a Pentagon source.
Rear Admiral Gregory Timberlake, the officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense who was tasked with overseeing the effort, briefed the Secretaries of Defense and Veterans Affairs on the system, specifically referencing Adara’s system by name in the written presentation. In a March 24 email to the government team, Timberlake wrote: “I am very pleased to tell you that both Secretaries accepted, approved and endorsed the contents of the brief and the way ahead we proposed…I cannot tell you how proud I am to be the facilitator of this exceptional DoD/VA effort.” (UPDATE: The DoD/VA Interagency Program Office’s communications director disputes this account: See her letter and the Prowler’s reply in Monday’s Reader Mail, available here.)
DOD requested that a bidding process be opened to build the JVLERS system, with one of the requirements being that the bid be made as a small business set-aside. This would have ensured that Adara and other small tech companies would be on equal footing with the larger, more traditional DOD contractors. “In fact, our larger contractors wouldn’t have been able to bid,” says the DOD source.
Within days of the bid request being formulated, an internal memo from a former Army nurse working in the Pentagon was leaked, accusing those involved in setting the contract terms of steering the contract to Adara, and accusing Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) of earmarking the project for Adara over the next two years for about $15 million. Adara, which is based in San Jose, Calif., has done work in Mississippi, but there is no evidence that Cochran was aware of Adara’s work there.
“On the face of it, the memo was absurd,” says the DOD source. “Everything was done by the book, we had a small tech company that came in here, showed they could do the work at about 1 percent of the cost others had done. You’d think that’s good for us and good for taxpayers.”
An IG investigation is now looking into the leaking of the internal memo that led to the scuttling of the bid process. “We think it was done to harm the Adara bid, embarrass our advocates on Capitol Hill, and get the project back into the good old boy network of bidders,” says the DOD source.
Perhaps. Sources in the White House now say that the Obama Administration wants the project to move ahead, and are looking at the firms that previously worked on the interoperability project to pick it up again — but more likely than not at a cost considerably higher than the $15 million appropriated for the DOD budget.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (24) | Leave a comment
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Pingback| 9.18.09 @ 7:13AM
The B&R Friday Edition | Black & Right links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Timothy L. Pennell| 9.18.09 @ 7:55AM
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blah, blah, blah. This story is all well and good, but, as usual, everybody's got the arguement WRONG. The QUESTION should be: Doesn't it bother anyone, that the guy who is so GUNG HO, to put everybodys' HEALTH CARE RECORDS on line, STILL HASN'T RELEASED HIS OWN? Just like the Public Option Health Care Plan. The REAL ARGUEMENT should be: If this FREAKIN PLAN is so GREAT, why are CONGRESS, and FEDERAL EMPLOYEES, and THE UNIONS EXEMPT? It's not about the COSTS! It's about the HIPOCRACY. My wifes is not from around these parts. And the food her family eats, your dog wouldn't eat. And when she tries to get me to eat it, I tell her: I ain't eating nothing that the dog won't eat. That's what these 'PLANS' are. They're stuff the dog won't eat. If it's 'Good Enough' for US, but NOT GOOD ENOUGH for THEM, than it's not good enough for US, either. WAKE UP, AMERICA! And don't listen to the PUKES on the LEFT. Calling everybody a Racist. They should know. They INVENTED it. And they're still at it. Just ask any POOR MINORITY PARENT in D.C., who's KID is being thrown back in to a DANGEROUS, FAILING, Public School, because OBAMA and his NEA MASTERS, have KILLED the SCHOOL VOUCHER PROGRAM. First rule of Slavery: Never let them learn to READ and WRITE. I guess Pelosi will say that it was Obamas' WHITE HALF that did that.
Tommy Flores | 9.20.09 @ 1:45AM
Timothy L. Pennell, You sold me with the first papagraph! In fact, Im going to post your reply on my blog. Do you mind my usuing your name?
http://roytflores.blogspot.com
tommy.flores@gmail.com
Darin| 9.18.09 @ 9:47AM
Is the author at all familiar with the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and the complex maze of rules and regulations involved? Most of the rules exist for a very good reason, but the combination of those rules often leads to conflicting guidance. Further, any contract decision can be protested with the cost of a postage stamp.
There's likely far more to this story than is reported here. Could there be some favortism happening? Perhaps, but that's what an investigation would determine. How "similiar" was the system Adara designed? A rowboat is "similiar" to an aircraft carrier in that they both float on water and can carry things, but the two are very different items. Any database containing medical records has serious concerns regarding security, privacy, reliability, availability, accuracy, etc.
Pingback| 9.18.09 @ 10:46AM
Twitter Trackbacks for The American Spectator : Obama's Chicago Pentagon [spectator. links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
LAB| 9.18.09 @ 12:44PM
I must tell you I was witness to a similar situation after 9/11. I worked on a program for the Pentagon that was high visibility and needed to be fixed for the Air Force. A young high tech company out of John Hopkins University was employed to fix the problem. They sure did fix it and in less than 3 months and to the delight of all of the users. Additional work was needed on the project to retire an aged computer system. This upstart company said they could do it for $10M and have it done before the year was out. However, this problem was pushed forward and the AF Commanding General demanded the acquisition area do something about it and now as it was an emergency situation. Ms. Darlene Druyun was the Acquisition person tasked to accomplish this job. At this time Lockeed Martin came in with a "power point" presentation on how they could fix the problem and on the strength of this presentation Ms. Druyun gave the contract to them to do the work even though there were objections from the users, the PEO shop and others. Luckily, others with common sense began oversight of this contract and limited Lock Martin to the tune of approximately $135M and gave them a time frame of 1 year to accomplish or show significant progress toward completion of the project. One year later they could not show significant progress and we wasted millions of dollars only to have to compete the contract and award it to the organization that absorbed the young start up companyand also at loss of time for the user. That old boy network is pretty strong!
Hardius| 9.18.09 @ 1:03PM
Everyday there is a new story appearing that smacks of institutional corruption and it almost always comes back to rules that are so complex that they can mean anything. Next you have a nest of government bureaucrats that can be led anywhere and never seem to achieve a decision based on rational thought, cohesive cogitation, or common sense. And finally you always end up with a decision that looks like it was crafted by the lobbyist. Afterwards no matter how long and hard they deny it, you never believe them because the evidence does not support the facts. Well here we go again.
Person of Choler| 9.20.09 @ 11:21AM
"The program to develop this interoperable system had been funded to the tune of over $10 billion over the past 10 years, most of the money going to Northrop Grumman and SAIC, but the program had stalled out."
Was this a misprint? Did I misread the article? Have we spent 10 billion dollars in 10 years on a nonfunctioning medical records system?
This in itself should be rather a big story
Jeff | 9.20.09 @ 10:55PM
I've been a software Business Analyst and Project Manager for almost 20 years and any record storage system that takes more than a dozen people more than a year to build is a fraud.
10 million even sounds like way too much ...
Poptropica| 4.8.10 @ 8:53PM
To celebrate the announcement of the upcoming Poptropica Mythology Island, the creators made a new item in the Poptropica Store. It’s the lightning staff and it looks really cool. When you hold it, it has a faint glow with sparkles that animate around it. Press the spacebar to activate it and the screen will go dark as thunderclouds move overhead. Then, you will see several lightning strikes come down to the ground around you!
This is definitely one of the coolest items to come out in poptropica in a while.
The new lightning staff is available in the poptropica Store for 75250 credits. Paid members can get it for free while their membership is active