Developing Joint Medical Capabilities
The Department of Defense (DOD) operates one of the nation's largest and most complex military health systems, which is tasked with providing medical services and support to the armed forces during military operations as well as for approximately 9 million eligible beneficiaries—including active duty personnel, retirees, and dependents worldwide. In fiscal year 2007, DOD spent more than $31 billion in total health care costs. In the past, the military services have independently developed their own internal programs and processes to handle recruiting, training and education, and other administrative services; those programs and processes have resulted in duplication of efforts and competition for resources. To achieve better alignment of authority, economies of scale, conserve resources, improve collaboration, and to prevent unnecessary duplication, DOD needs to combine, realign, or otherwise change many aspects of its military health system structure, such as the consolidation of management levels and the execution of health care services.
In 2006, the Deputy Secretary of Defense approved an option that would consolidate key common services and functions; however, GAO reported that DOD did not demonstrate detailed qualitative and quantitative analyses in support of selecting and implementing the new process in terms of benefits, costs, and risks. Moreover, DOD's business case did not document any performance measures that would be used to assess whether this option would meet the goals for improving DOD's medical health system structure. As DOD emphasizes a greater importance on integration and the development of joint operations, DOD needs to look for opportunities to extend these efforts into improving its health care system by combining shared services to enhance the medical readiness of all forces, better integrate health care services, and remove redundancy and avoid unnecessary costs that could achieve savings in the hundreds of millions. As DOD begins to restructure it military health system, it needs to
- build detailed qualitative and quantitative analyses that identify benefits, costs, and risks; and
- establish and monitor outcome-focused performance measures to help guide the transformation of its multibillion-dollar medical health care system.
^ Back to topKey Reports
- Defense Health Care: DOD Needs to Address the Expected Benefits, Costs, and Risks for Its Newly Approved Medical Command Structure
- GAO-08-122, October 12, 2007
- Summary (HTML) Highlights Page (PDF) Full Report (PDF, 33 pages) Accessible Text Recommendations (HTML)
