During a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing this week on the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) EHR modernization project progress, Congressman Will Hurd (R-Texas) stated that the latest update encouraged him “for probably the first time,” according to a report in FCW.
The VA’s $16 billion electronic health record (EHR) modernization project—the $10 billion contract signed with Cerner last May, plus $6 billion for infrastructure upgrades and project management support—will replace the department’s 40-year-old legacy health information system, the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), over the next 10 years with the new Cerner system, which is currently in the pilot phase at Department of Defense (DoD). The VA project will begin with a set of test sites in the Pacific Northwest in March 2020.
In October, the U.S. Secretaries of the VA and DoD signaled their commitment to achieving interoperability between the two agencies by implementing a single, seamlessly integrated EHR, according to a joint statement both agencies issued. In the Feb. 26 hearing, subcommittee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) called achieving interoperability with the DoD’s health records system "this committee's top priority,” according to the FCW report.
And while VA officials have admitted early hiccups—namely “that VA's 131 unique versions of Vista is slowing down the integration”—the good news is that Cerner has mapped the data from all the different versions for the transition, Richard Stone, M.D., executive in charge, Veterans Health Administration, testified at the hearing, per the report.
“This is about moving from a highly disjointed system without data integration to one that is fully data-integrated and therefore interoperable,” said Stone, per the FCW report. And that’s when Rep. Hurd noted his encouragement as well, stating, “Once you map the data, having this move from one system to another should be quick. Now it's about … how can you take some of that data that's probably localized and put it into the cloud?”
Of course, the VA will look to avoid the pitfalls that have taken place during the DoD-Cerner EHR project. In a Congressional hearing earlier this year, Senate VA Committee Ranking Member Jon Tester expressed to new VA CIO James Gfrerer it “is critical to ensure that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past.” Tester, a Montana senator, added, “EHR modernization cannot be allowed to fail.”
