McKesson announced today that the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Defense Health Agency (DHA) has awarded a $139 million, five-year contract for RelayHealth’s patient engagement and interoperable secure messaging solutions. The solutions will serve the Military Health System’s (MHS) patients, physicians, physician assistants, nurse case managers, physical therapists, occupational therapists, dentists, and other members of the care team. The contract is a nine-month base transition-in period with four 12-month option periods.
RelayHealth’s solutions help providers improve access to care for DoD beneficiaries, advance care team coordination across provider care settings and enhance patient engagement through secure messaging, educational content and care management tools that improve access to care team members and health data.
Secure messaging is a critical access tool that allows the MHS to increase capacity to meet enrollee demand for care by supporting delivery of virtual care through patient-to-provider and provider-to-provider communications before and after actual appointments. SM facilitates delegation-of-care tasks to providers with the expertise to deal with them without escalating all messages to the physician level.
“We are honored to continue supporting the DHA in their readiness mission, which is to ensure a medically ready force and ready medical force. RelayHealth is helping to improve access to care, care coordination, care quality, and the responsible management of cost, while the DHA continues to evolve towards a more patient-centered and connected model of care,” said Ken Tarkoff, senior vice president and general manager of RelayHealth. “We also fully understand the need for secure health data. RelayHealth’s ability to meet the increasing security demands in the healthcare industry, as demonstrated, for example, by our role as the service provider for CommonWell Health Alliance®, has strongly positioned us to meet the DoD requirements.”