Pentagon’s $18 Million Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) Tool Fails To Deliver

For at least two years the Military Health System has touted a software tool under development at a cost of more than $18 million as a way to help gather information about troops impaired by the signature wound of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- traumatic brain injury, which results from exposure to roadside bombs. But a six-week probe by Nextgov shows this tool has nothing to do with the management or assessment of TBI cases.

MHS reported that 244,719 troops have been diagnosed with TBI from 2000 through the first quarter of fiscal 2012, up 72,579 from 2009, when it awarded the contract to Vangent Inc., now owned by General Dynamics. The Defense Health Information Management System, which manages information technology projects for MHS, said in a fact sheet posted on its website in October 2010 that the Traumatic Brain Injury/Behavioral Health software tool would include capabilities to fulfill a Defense Department “mandate requiring neurocognitive readiness assessments for all service members within six months of deployment.”...

The Air Force evaluated the TBI/BH tool at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia in the fall of 2011 and determined the software did not live up to the hype. Lt. Col. Robert Vanecek, Air Force chief of behavioral health optimization, told Nextgov in an interview last week that “we scratched our heads over the name . . . this project has nothing to do with TBI. It is a standard clinical documentation tool.”...