Get Mission Meets Tech free, every Tuesday and Friday.
I cover federal health IT the way it should be covered -- with a thesis, evidence, and a real stake. Every Tuesday and Friday, you get the policy shifts, contract movement, and operational implications that most outlets skip.
--Policy shifts explained. Who moved, what changed, and why it matters for your program.
--Contract movement tracked. Awards, recompetes, and procurement signals with the backstory.
--Operational implications interpreted. I tell you what happened, then I tell you what to do about it.
Free
Subscribe now.
Join defense contractors, DHA leadership, VA executives, and federal health practitioners who read this every Tuesday and Friday.
Leadership changes, budget decisions, and modernization signals translated into what they actually mean for your mission, your contract, or your patient population.
02
Contract movement
Awards, recompetes, and acquisition strategy analysis. The context vendors leave out and wire services miss -- who won, why, and what it signals next.
03
Operational impact
Isolated headlines connected into mission, clinical, and technical patterns. What happened, why it matters, and what it means for the people doing the work.
Sample issue
Read one before you subscribe.
Every issue starts with a thesis and backs it up. No filler paragraphs, no press release rewrites. Read a recent briefing to see the format, depth, and voice for yourself.
Every Tuesday and Friday. Short enough to read during a coffee break, specific enough to forward to your team.
Is the newsletter free?
The Tuesday and Friday intelligence briefings are free and will always be free. MMT Premium adds a deeper layer for readers who need more than the briefings: monthly Capture Intelligence sheets with full action windows, early access to analysis, and Capture Corner depth on every article. Revenue comes from ProposalPulse, MarketPulse, and MMT Premium. Reader-funded, no sponsors. See what's in Premium →
Can I unsubscribe anytime?
One click, bottom of every email, instant. No guilt trip, no "are you sure" loops.
Vice Adm. Darin Via's line that data is the Defense Health Agency's North Star got loose this week. The strategy underneath it is eight pages, signed in March, with the right principles and no dates. Each of its five lines of effort has been built somewhere with a number on the page, and the places where the same work failed are on the record too. This issue walks each line against both, and ends at the scorecard DHA has been publishing for a year without calling it one.
This week Matt Clark told his LinkedIn network he had accepted the job of Assistant Director for Research, Development, and Acquisition at the Defense Health Agency, and with it the title of Component Acquisition Executive, effective at the end of the month. In March 2019 he published, in Army acquisition media, the fiscal year in which a naloxone auto-injector still in prototype would clear the FDA. It cleared in that fiscal year. As of this week dha.mil still lists the seat as acting, and the buying machinery around it was rebuilt this spring.
On October 3, 2025, three days after a Navy reservist finished more than 1,400 consecutive days on active duty, the Defense Health Agency told him he was no longer eligible for TRICARE, as determined by information in DEERS. Congress had deleted the words that disqualified him eight years earlier. The benefit he lost includes the dental coverage that decides, more than any other single factor, whether a reserve soldier can deploy.
VA's Inspector General reported in June that clinicians were drafting patient notes with two generative AI chat tools, neither designated high-impact under federal AI policy. One of those tools does not appear in VA's 367-record AI use case inventory at all. It reached the department inside a $4.65 billion Microsoft enterprise agreement, and it is logged in a separate spreadsheet with three columns, under the heading of generating first drafts of documents.
On August 11 in New Orleans, the Director of the Defense Health Agency told an industry audience that the character of warfare is shifting and health IT is part of that shift. The FY2027 request his enterprise submitted asks Congress for $1.019 billion in medical research, forty-seven million above last year's ask. A Marine Corps procurement line called Field Medical Equipment went from $15.7 million to $227.8 million across the same two budgets.
Flock's drone lifts off a dock on three triggers, and the third is a license plate hit. VA has bought the plate readers. The records notice that governs VA Police data was rewritten from top to bottom in April 2024 and does not contain the word camera.
In April I wrote that the ecosystem would either build a shared evidence layer before the Pentagon asked for one, or scramble after. On August 3 the President asked, and the ninety days that follow decide which kind of answer he gets.
On July 27, the Army approved BATDOK-J for Army-wide fielding as a download to hardware Soldiers already carry. The software had been in operational use with Air Force pararescuemen since 2019. What changed in the last ten months was the path to the Soldier, and that mechanism is the part worth copying.
Federal law has looked at one of them. On January 1, 2027, it looks at all seven, and the two exceptions holding medical equipment out of the fight are the thinnest part of the wall.
The White House released two documents on July 21. The report names a million veterans' genomic records as an asset to be unlocked. The memo carries the deadline, assigns the work to six agencies, and never uses the word. The VA is not one of the six.
The Department of War suspended third-party certification on July 13. The mechanism that cost Health Net's parent eleven million dollars was never part of it, and the network that mechanism asks you to vouch for is changing faster than the document describing it.