On September 15, in the telehealth and patient portal session of the Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization office's annual summit, a participant asked what the two departments are doing about DoD Instruction 6040.48, the 2018 policy that says the Military Health System will give every beneficiary a personal health record the patient controls. The panel answered that the portal is a different thing. The same session then called the portal a digital front door, a phrase DoW used in its own 2024 solicitation for one. This issue reads the instruction that says which of those is true, follows what the departments built and unbuilt in the eight years since, and ends with the two people the portal serves least: a sergeant who leaves in November and a fifteen-year-old who cannot log in at all.
Executive Order 14426 gives the Department of War 30 days to send every separating service member's records to VA the moment they leave, to fix a delay the White House puts at 90 to 180 days and sources to nothing. The record breaks in three places the order never names: where it is written, how it is certified, and whether the rater can open it. Each has a fix with a number attached, and the contract review due January 6 is where the three lines could go.
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 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.
The federal government put the most capable commercial AI models inside its agencies last year at about a dollar a seat. That price is the tell. In federal health the value moved to everything the dollar did not buy: the platforms the models ride on, the accreditation that lets them run, the governance that keeps them safe, and the encryption that has to outlive the patient.
On April 20, 2026, the Defense Health Agency replaced thirty years of how it buys medical capability. A new portfolio-based acquisition model, a requirements process built to kill 'bring me a rock,' and an FY2027 budget that already voted on where the money goes. Here is what changed, who runs it, and how it shows up in live contracts.
No code. No exploit kit. Plain English. A security researcher pulled 60 pages of hidden instructions out of an AI doctor, rewrote them, made it triple a drug dose. The Defense Health Agency is fielding the same architecture in military exam rooms right now.
The Pentagon's proposed COMP and PSCP accounts split the Defense Health Program in two. The Defense Health Agency already buys 65 percent of military health care from the private sector. The line item is finally on the page. The policy that was supposed to bend that line is not.