Arriving in 2012 as the new CIO of the Military Health System, David Bowen was immediately tasked with helping to merge the armed services’ medical organizations into a single Defense Health Agency. Within a year, he stood up a health IT shared service organization to support the nascent agency. The biggest challenge, he said in an interview with Federal Times, was culture.
Now, however, much of the initial hard work is complete and new set of goals is taking center stage.
Bowen said efforts to develop several shared services are on track.
“We’re in the process now of transitioning the systems that were managed individually by the services into the DHA,” he said. “We have teams working on how that’s going to be done. Army, Navy, and Air Force, obviously had their own set of systems. So, we’re going to consolidate them. We sort of forklifted those service specific organizations — IT organizations — into the DHA and we’ll be making some personnel adjustments and putting people into the functional areas of our new organization where they would belong from a functional standpoint. The service organizations were pretty much self-contained. They had contracting shops, and HR shops and things like that. And now we’ll be able to put those functional components into the corresponding functional elements of the shared services organization.”
Read the full interview at FederaTimes.com.
