“After failing to present Congress with a full picture of the costs associated with its electronic health record modernization program, the Department of Veterans Affairs is bringing in an independent body to review the program and provide a full cost estimate.”
“Deputy CIO Paul Brubaker told lawmakers on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee during a legislative hearing Thursday that the VA has contracted the Institute for Defense Analysis to analyze and provide a total lifecycle cost of the EHR modernization program — which was first pitched as a $10 billion project tag before ballooning to $16 billion, and likely more.”
“IDA will kick off its work later this month, and VA estimates it will be 12 months before it gets a full estimate, Brubaker said.”
“The VA hopes this will ‘make sure that for once and for all, we actually capture all of these end-to-end costs’ associated with the development and deployment of the program, now three years into its rollout. The program is designed to be a complete overhaul of the VA’s health IT system, with a new cloud-based system from Cerner that should one day be interoperable with the Department of Defense’s own EHR.”
“Earlier this year, the VA came under fire after a series of reviews by its inspector general and Government Accountability Office found that the department underestimated the costs of infrastructure upgrades in the modernization program by billions of dollars, largely because of inconsistencies in how the department tracks the costs of the sprawling program across its offices and reports them to Congress.”
“This error led Congress to get involved, proposing the VA Electronic Health Record Transparency Act to force the VA to better account for its spending on the program and properly report it to lawmakers…” Read the full article here.
Source: VA launching yearlong independent cost estimate of EHR modernization – By Billy Mitchell, October 7, 2021. FedScoop.
