Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO: (1) assessed the status of the Department of Defense (DOD) Composite Health Care System's (CHCS) cost, schedule, performance, and benefits; and (2) identified and evaluated DOD changes in CHCS development, testing, and deployment strategy.

GAO found that: (1) CHCS is a state-of-the-art, integrated medical information system that DOD is developing to improve the timeliness, availability, and quality of patient-care data; (2) as of March 1991, the DOD life-cycle cost estimate was about $1.56 billion, but was subject to change since it did not include such CHCS components as the costs to archive and retrieve patient data and developing a more streamlined method for physicians' entry of orders; (3) DOD has not quantified CHCS benefits; (4) DOD violated DOD directives and statutory restrictions by expending funds to deploy CHCS at 77 medical treatment facilities beyond its test sites without completing operational test and evaluation (OT&E) and obtaining committee approval; (5) due to design and testing difficulties, DOD plans to deploy CHCS without such essential capabilities as the ability to archive and retrieve patient records and a streamlined method for physicians' entry of patient orders; (6) deploying CHCS without archiving is impractical since this function is critical to the system's operational performance and the establishment of a credible cost estimate; and (7) it is unclear whether deploying CHCS without physicians' entry of inpatient orders will be cost-beneficial.