Genevieve Morris, who has been detailed to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) from her position as the principal deputy national coordinator for the Department of Health and Human Services, will move over full time to lead the newly establishment VA Office of Electronic Health Record Modernization (OEHRM).
VA signed a contract with Cerner Corp. on May 17 to replace its decades-old Veterans Integrated System Technology Architecture (VistA) EHR technology over the next 10 years with the new Cerner system, which is in the pilot phase at the Department of Defense (DoD). The system is designed to allow the VA to have patient data shared seamlessly between VA and DoD.
Launched in late June, OEHRM will manage the preparation, deployment and maintenance of VA’s new electronic health-care record system and the health IT tools dependent upon it. Morris and OEHRM will work in close alignment with VA’s Under Secretary of Health and CIO.
“OEHRM, the Veterans Health Administration and the Office of Information and Technology will continue to collaborate closely to ensure this important transition is as smooth as possible for our Veterans, clinicians and staff,” Morris said in a prepared statement. “We are working hard to configure and design a system focused on quality, safety and patient outcomes, which will allow health IT innovations within one VA facility to be used across the entire VA healthcare system.”
At ONC, Morris has worked on the draft Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA). In a July 12 tweet, Morris wrote that “working with the team at ONC has been fantastic and a highlight of my career. I’m very thankful for the people I’ve had the opportunity to work with and the work we’ve gotten to do together. Also happy I’ll get to keep working with them to push interop and health IT forward.”
