Department of Defense Awards Healthcare Billing Contract to Unisys

Unisys Corporation announced today that the Resources Information Technology Program Office (RITPO) of Department of Defense?s (DoD) TRICARE Management Activity awarded the company a contract to configure commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software for the Military Health System?s (MHS) enterprise-wide Medical Treatment Facility (MTF) billing and accounts receivable operations. The project is known as the Patient Accounting System Charge Master-Based Billing (CMBB) program.

The contract is a time-and-materials contract with a one-year base period and four, one-year option periods, exercisable at the government?s discretion. If DoD exercises all four options, the estimated value to Unisys is $42 million. The base year is valued at approximately $10 million. The award occurred in the third quarter.

Under the contract, Unisys and its team will configure a COTS solution to operate with the MTFs that produce bills and reconcile individual beneficiary/patient accounts.

On an MHS enterprise level, this CMBB effort suggests substantive process and policy changes as RITPO, the MHS and each of the military medical departments examine and elect to implement important, system-wide changes that will enable a next generation of revenue cycle management operations and practices.

Utilizing this new set of applications and processes in combination with other recent acquisition efforts already underway within RITPO will enable the MTFs to generate patient accounting data that is consistent with nationally accepted prospective payment and managed care financial management practices. The CMBB effort will interface with a wide variety of MHS legacy systems as well as new solutions including AHLTA ? a DoD enterprise-wide, electronic health record system.

The new CMBB solution will allow MTFs to bill for both inpatient and outpatient services and collect more effectively from third parties such as health insurance companies. Presently, MTFs have more limited success billing third-party carriers as the current government-developed solution does not meet a number of the healthcare market expectations for billing details and compliance with various commercial requirements.

Money that these facilities collect may be used to provide or support additional services to the MHS beneficiaries.

?Unisys is proud to provide RITPO and the MHS with a mature, commercial package that has a sound industry footprint and a clear technical vision for future product evolution in healthcare revenue cycle management,? said Gary Hobbs, managing partner, defense and advanced programs, Unisys Federal Systems.

?We intend to capitalize on our experience in the MHS on other large scale DoD enterprise-wide COTS solution configurations and implementations to make this CMBB effort a success for DoD,? he added.