Summary: In response to a legislative requirement, GAO monitored the Department of Defense's (DOD) operational test and evaluation of the Composite Health Care System (CHCS) to determine whether: (1) DOD implementation plans were reasonable; and (2) test objectives were achievable within established time frames.
GAO found that: (1) DOD was over 6 months behind schedule in deploying CHCS to test hospitals due to start-up problems during initial system implementation and its establishment of a greater contractor work load than initially proposed; (2) the extent to which the hospitals serving as test sites were representative of all DOD medical facilities was questionable, since DOD did not include the largest hospitals where attaining performance was difficult but system benefits were greatest, and the smallest hospitals, which comprised the majority of DOD medical treatment facilities but had fewer apparent system benefits; and (3) although DOD developed plans for corrective actions to add larger and smaller hospitals to the test site mix and lengthen the test period, there were concerns over the contractor's ability to install enough hardware and software to meet the test requirements at the additional sites within the new test period, since it had not developed definitive corrective action plans or system implementation schedules.
