“The Veterans Affairs Department will continue to partner with the Defense Department and commercial software developer Cerner in the rollout of its $16 billion electronic health records modernization, but changes in the way the agency is managing the rollout are coming, Secretary Denis McDonough said Tuesday.”
“Speaking before the House Veterans Affairs Committee, McDonough said a strategic review he ordered in March on the rollout should conclude ‘in a few weeks,’ but has already identified governance and other issues plaguing the process.”
“McDonough ordered the review when issues surfaced following the agency’s first deployment of the Cerner Millennium health records software in October in Spokane, Washington. VA has been working for more than two years with Cerner to deploy a single health records system across the agency that will be interoperable with the Cerner-built systems in development by the Defense Department and the Leidos Partnership for Defense Health.”
“’We are not revisiting the relationship with DOD on this, but we do have to have much more candor with each other and ourselves frankly about what precisely we need and require from the Cerner system,’ McDonough said. ‘We are not changing out from the Cerner system, let me reiterate that.'”
“However, McDonough said the department’s training and requirements development, along with its governance and management of the program, ‘needs some work…'” Read the full article here.
Source: VA to Wrap Health Records Review ‘In a Few Weeks,’ Secretary Says – By Frank Konkel, June 8, 2021. Nextgov.
