The Gateway

It’s my goal to keep MC4 aligned to the Army’s strategy, mission, functions, tasks and resources. Most importantly, we need to provide our medical personnel and Soldiers with an efficient EMR system. We are making progress in this direction every day.

Over the years, we’ve received feedback from customers in theater who were issued equipment that didn’t quite align with their function. Others reported that they didn’t have enough equipment in some areas of their unit. We took this feedback, made some changes and starting with fiscal year 2013 (FY13), we’ll roll out the changes.

The system architecture envisioned in the original Basis of Issue Plans (BOIPs) for MC4 was based on a projection of available communications, information flow and Soldier usage. Our real-world experience in theater gave us a chance to refine and more clearly define what the overall MC4 system should look like when deployed. We’ve made these adjustments so everything more closely reflects the combat environment.

Deploying medical units, such as forward surgical teams, will receive more laptops and fewer handhelds. The footprints for those large and medium network servers will also be reduced to just the combat support hospitals and medical logistics companies that specifically need them.

To help with this process, we collaborated with the Army Medical Department Center & School combat developer to revise the BOIPs so they are based on the function and structure of the unit as opposed to specific personnel. With FY13 equipping documents, units will start to see changes reflected on their modified table of organization and equipment (MTOE) based on these changes from the revised BOIPs.

We are continuing to evaluate these new requirements to ensure we don’t unnecessarily increase property management burdens on units. The changes currently slated for FY13 will result in about 25 percent fewer MC4 handhelds and an increase of MC4 laptops by 50 percent across the entire force. As the changes to the BOIPs are being applied, they can be found in the authorization documents provided by the U.S. Army Force Management Support Agency.

I hope you’ll agree that restructuring the system architecture will provide a more usable system as it better aligns the equipment within a unit. Feedback is always welcome. I’d be interested in hearing what other changes we could make to improve the fielding process.