Millennium Dental Program

Program Context & Business Challenge

VA’s existing dental application was aging and no longer met the needs of the broader Electronic Health Record modernization effort. Because Cerner (now Oracle Health) did not have an existing dental solution, a new capability needed to be developed and integrated with Cerner Millennium, with the longer-term potential to support other clients as well.

I served as the overall Program Manager for the $11M effort, coordinating delivery across 12 projects and workstreams and aligning the multiple project managers and workstream leads responsible for design, requirements, application development, cybersecurity, testing, and related activities. The program also required close coordination with Henry Schein One as an external solution partner and with internationally distributed development teams, creating a highly complex, multi-organizational delivery environment.

Leadership & Delivery

I managed the $11M effort as an integrated program, owning the overall Integrated Master Schedule (IMS) and providing cross-functional leadership across the project managers and workstream leads responsible for the 12 projects and workstreams. I used the program schedule, governance cadence, dependency management, and decision-making processes to keep independently managed work aligned to the overall solution, client commitments, and deployment objectives.

The distributed delivery model required close coordination across Cerner, VA, Henry Schein One, and internationally based development teams. I maintained visibility into cross-project dependencies and risks, brought the appropriate technical and business leads together when decisions crossed workstream boundaries, and provided consolidated program-level reporting and escalation to leadership.

In addition to my Program Manager responsibilities, I also served as the Project Manager for the infrastructure build projects and the subsequent cybersecurity approval efforts across six environments. This gave me direct accountability for critical-path infrastructure readiness and approval activities while also ensuring those milestones remained integrated with the broader program schedule and deployment plan.

Program Disposition & Leadership Impact

The program advanced through substantial design, development, infrastructure, and cybersecurity readiness work before a decision outside the project team’s control resulted in the solution not proceeding to broader deployment. By that point, all six infrastructure environments had been completed and progressed through the required cybersecurity approvals, and integrated solution testing was nearing completion.

Reaching that stage required sustained coordination across the 12 projects and workstreams, multiple project managers, Cerner and VA stakeholders, an external vendor, and globally distributed development teams. The effort demonstrated my ability to bring complex, distributed delivery organizations into alignment and drive a highly interdependent program through critical infrastructure, cybersecurity, and integrated testing milestones.