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Report | Oct. 23, 2014

Followup Audit: Enterprise BloodManagement System Not Ready forFull Deployment

DODIG-2015-008

Objective

Our objective was to determine whether the system configuration and early operational assessment for the Enterprise Blood Management System (EBMS) will meet the system requirements as agreed to in Recommendations A.4. and B.3 from DoD OIG Report No. D-2002-010, “Armed Services Blood Program Defense Blood Standard System,” and whether these corrective actions intended to mitigate the identified problems.

Findings

The Program Executive Officer for the Defense Health Clinical Systems could not demonstrate that the system design, configuration, and early operational assessment for EBMS will meet the requirements as agreed. This occurred because the Program Executive Officer was still in the early stages of the acquisition process for the donor system and did not initially require the Composite Health Care System to interface with the transfusion system. As a result, after 13 years, the Program Executive Officer’s actions were not completed to show that EBMS will meet the intent of Recommendations A.4 and B.3.a. The Military Health System leaders deployed the Theater Blood capability to meet the intent of recommendation B.3.b instead of EBMS.

The Program Executive Officer planned to acquire three stand-alone DoD blood product information technology capabilities that will manage information about the donors, donations, transfusions, and blood product inventories. This occurred because the Program Executive Officer and the Component Acquisition Executive for Defense Health Agency did not manage the donor, transfusion, and the Theater Blood capability as a DoD information technology portfolio. As a result, the Program Executive Officer did not achieve maximum efficiencies for the Department’s blood program and is at an increased risk of not fully reaching the overall blood program’s performance goals.

Recommendations

The Program Executive Officer should continue efforts to implement corrective actions as agreed to in Recommendation A.4 and B.3.a of DoD OIG Report No. D-2002-010. The Component Acquisition Executive should evaluate how EBMS, Theater Blood capability, and any other DoD information technology blood product capabilities would benefit from being interoperable as an information technology portfolio, as required.

Management Comments and Our Response

The Director, Defense Health Agency, responding for the Component Acquisition Executive, Program Executive Officer, and Director, Armed Services Blood Program, fully addressed all specifics of the recommendations, and no further comments are required.