Photo By Kris Patterson | 220222-N-DB606-002 – Kevin Gerald, far left, Deputy Head of NIWC Atlantic’s Shore...... read more read more
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A Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Atlantic team earned an esteemed local engineering award for its efforts in expanding telehealth for American warfighters and their families.
The NIWC Atlantic-led Military Health System (MHS) Video Connect Collaboration (VCC) Team was named the 2022 Technical Project Team of the Year (TPTOY) by Charleston Engineers Joint Council (CEJC) and Project Management Institute (PMI), Charleston Chapter, during the CEJC Engineers Week Banquet on Feb. 22 at The Citadel.
The CEJC/PMI Charleston TPTOY award recognizes an exceptional project team that exhibited the tenets of project management indicative of high performance in developing and implementing a technical project that has been well managed and delivered stakeholder value.
NIWC Atlantic’s MHS VCC team won this award for its exemplary efforts implementing teleconferencing tools, Video Connect and Pexip, to expand virtual health capabilities at medical treatment facilities (MTFs) across the Defense Health Agency (DHA) enterprise.
“This new telehealth platform enabled military health care providers to see more patients safely throughout the global pandemic, while protecting patient information and health care data in transit,” said Kevin Gerald, deputy head of NIWC Atlantic’s Shore Command and Control, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Integration Department and vice president of PMI Charleston’s Military Programs, as he presented the MHS VCC team their award.
The MHS VCC team, a cross-functional team of engineers, data scientists and technical professionals from multiple government agencies and industry partners, operates under the technical leadership of the Clinical Infrastructure Modernization (CIM) Integrated Product Team (IPT), part of the Defense Health Information Technology (DHIT) Division of NIWC Atlantic.
The CIM IPT is a key engineering and integration provider to DHA for shared services that consolidate and modernize clinical information technology (IT) infrastructure including cloud broker services, cloud computing, DevSecOps, code pipeline management, and other datacenter operations related tasks. These services simplify and improve the MHS IT environment so that health information is readily available to support more than 200,000 DHA health care professionals and 9.6 million beneficiaries.
Since the onset of COVID-19, DHA hospitals and clinics had experienced facility restrictions and many of their patients had been unable to physically visit an MTF due to quarantine or other travel impediments. The MHS VCC team collaborated to rapidly engineer, accredit, and deploy several hundred servers for the new MHS Video Connect and Pexip system, which is capable of supporting more than 5,000 concurrent sessions.
“This new capability extended the reach of health care into patients’ homes, which was absolutely vital for those patients,” said Patrick Leitner, datacenter operations branch chief and CIM IPT lead. “As the global pandemic continues, this MHS Video Connect and Pexip system will become increasingly important for the MHS and its service members who require health care that’s accessible to them no matter where they are located.”
To implement the new system, the MHS VCC team had to first establish a new DevSecOps Community Cloud (DSOCC) accredited environment. Through the standup of DSOCC, the team saved the DHA $875,000 last year in reduced software licensing, labor, and cloud hosting expenses, and is expected to save an additional $2.2 million per year based on the current customers in the onboarding pipeline.
“The team went beyond customer expectations to ensure the MHS Video Connect solution could be deployed securely, quickly and cost-effectively,” said Cal Stephens, director of NIWC Atlantic’s DHIT Division.
The MHS VCC team also made efficient use of a widespread group of more than 75 developers in the Department of Defense (DoD) to source capability requirements and objectively compare/contrast them to derive common DevSecOps community requirements and capability needs that could be built into the DSOCC platform for all to leverage.
“The lessons learned from standing up the DSOCC have been shared with the NIWC Data Center and Cloud Hosting Services (DC2HS) and DevSecOps teams to foster an organizational learning environment that benefits the Navy at large and other NIWC supported programs,” said Stephens. “These lessons learned will help NIWC Atlantic directly as the command is working through its own DevSecOps strategy for the Navy, in addition to saving the DHA time and money in the future.”
NIWC Atlantic Commanding Officer Capt. Nicole Nigro commended the MHS VCC team for their accomplishments.
“This new telehealth platform has made healthcare more accessible for all service members and has become a critical component in ensuring our warfighters are not only medically ready but can easily deploy across the globe at a moment’s notice,” said Nigro. “This team’s contributions are making a difference and will dramatically increase the safety and readiness of our fleet today and in the coming decades.”
The MHS VCC team has also received the following awards during the past twelve months: a Letter of Appreciation from the Assistant Director of DHA’s Healthcare Administration; a Navy Civilian Service Commendation Medal to Aaron Rothberg; NIWC Mission Execution Leadership of the Quarter Award for fourth quarter, FY21 to Patrick Leitner; and a DoD CIO Annual Award Honorable Mention 2021 for the team’s Engineering, Solutions Architecture & IT Business Analytics Division (ESA-BAD) team.
As a part of Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, NIWC Atlantic provides systems engineering and acquisition to deliver information warfare capabilities to the naval, joint and national warfighter through the acquisition, development, integration, production, test, deployment, and sustainment of interoperable command, control, communications, computer, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, cyber and information technology capabilities.
| Date Taken: | 02.22.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 03.14.2022 15:34 |
| Story ID: | 416449 |
| Location: | CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, US |
| Web Views: | 115 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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