Summary

The Composite Health Care System, an automated medical information system being developed by the Defense Department (DOD), is intended to be the backbone for the military's worldwide medical operations. It is designed to provide medical personnel with instant access to patient information, from medical history to current treatments or vital statistics. As such, the system's performance and response times will be critical. DOD, however, is placing the performance of the system at risk because it has not provided adequate performance measurement and analysis tools or corrected weaknesses in its performance management methodology. Without appropriate performance measurement and analysis tools, DOD cannot diagnose causes of response-time problems or project how workload growth and configuration upgrades will affect system response times. Moreover, DOD's decision not to focus on routine analysis and elimination of extremely long response times can discourage system use. The lack of reliable methodology to plan for reserve capacity has also led to the unnecessary purchase of excess computer processing power. Unless these problems are corrected, DOD risks continuing to replicate and proliferate system performance problems and adding to the costs of deploying the system.

GAO found that: (1) DOD lacks adequate CHCS performance management tools and methodology; (2) DOD performance measurement tools do not collect the data necessary to detect response-time problems, diagnose their causes, and determine their significance; (3) DOD lacks state-of-the-art analysis tools which would help it determine the causes and effects of performance problems; (4) DOD does not effectively use the limited data collected by its performance measurement tools; (5) the DOD methodology for managing CHCS performance is weak and does not require it to perform routine analysis of extremely long response times; (6) users may refrain from using CHCS to its full potential if problems in response times persist; and (7) the DOD method of providing reserve CHCS capacity is unreliable and may result in excessive or deficient reserve capacity, incur unnecessary costs, and result in unsatisfactory system performance.