Senate VA (Department of Veterans Affairs) Committee Ranking Member Jon Tester has urged new VA CIO James Gfrerer to avoid past failures as he helps to move forward the department’s EHR (electronic health record) modernization project.
Gfrerer, an ex-marine and former executive director at Ernst & Young, was recently confirmed by the Senate to serve as assistant secretary of information and technology and CIO (chief information officer) at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
One of Gfrerer’s top tasks will be helping to update hospitals’ infrastructures as the VA continues to work on replacing the department’s 40-year-old legacy EHR system, called VistA, by adopting the same platform as the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), a Cerner EHR system. That contract was finally signed last May and the implementation project is scheduled to span over 10 years.
In a letter to Gfrerer, Tester, a Montana senator, noted that while many of the responsibilities for the implementation of VA’s new EHR fall to the recently created Office of Electronic Health Record Management, the CIO’s role “is critical to ensure that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past.”
The office that Gfrerer now leads, VA’s Office of Information and Technology, will still be in charge of managing infrastructure needs for both the patient care facilities that have received the EHR upgrades and those that have not, Tester stated. “This task will require significant resources and robust oversight as VA manages a decade-long rollout,” he said.
Tester further wrote, “EHR modernization cannot be allowed to fail, and your leadership is essential if VA is to ultimately achieve a truly interoperable health record for veterans.”
In regard to “past failures,” it’s possible that Tester is referring to media reports that have outlined some of the significant issues that the DoD has had with its own Cerner rollouts. In reports throughout 2018, the initial feedback on the four military site EHR rollouts has been less than ideal. A Politico report first detailed the first stage of implementations noted that it “has been riddled with problems so severe they could have led to patient deaths.” Indeed, some clinicians at one of four pilot centers, Naval Station Bremerton in Washington, quit because they were terrified they might hurt patients, or even kill them, the report attested.
Providing an update on Cerner’s progress with the DoD EHR implementations, a company executive recently noted that he is seeing “measurable progress” at the DoD’s initial operational capability (IOC) sites.
