Defense Health officials are advising Tricare beneficiaries that the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System, or DEERS, will be temporarily unavailable this weekend.
The planned outage is scheduled to begin at 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Friday, Oct. 9, and end Sunday, Oct. 11. As of Thursday, information was not available about what specific time the outage is expected to end on Sunday.
During the outage, beneficiaries won’t be able to make any updates to their DEERS record. Pharmacies and healthcare providers may not be able to check a patient’s Tricare eligibility.
Officials note that there are other benefits systems that rely on DEERS, and the outage may affect those systems, too.
The Defense Manpower Data Center is updating DEERS, and it will be moving to a new cloud environment.
“The Defense Health Agency is working closely with DMDC during this time,” officials said in an announcement about the planned outage. “The goal is to keep any disruption as small as possible.”
DEERS is a database of information about military personnel, Defense Department and military service civilians and their family members. To get Tricare coverage, beneficiaries must be registered in DEERS.
Beneficiaries who need to make changes, or who need to check their information in DEERS, should do so before the weekend by visiting milconnect before 9 p.m. Friday.
This year’s Tricare Open Season begins Nov. 9 and ends Dec. 8. During that time, beneficiaries can enroll in or change their health plan for the next year. Changes made during open season will take effect Jan. 1, 2027.
Karen has covered military families, quality of life and consumer issues for Military Times for more than 30 years, and is co-author of a chapter on media coverage of military families in the book “A Battle Plan for Supporting Military Families.” She previously worked for newspapers in Guam, Norfolk, Jacksonville, Fla., and Athens, Ga.
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