“Kurt DelBene, the new chief information officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said he planned to continue support of the agency’s homegrown electronic health records system during the transition to a commercial system scheduled to be completed in 2028.”
“The modernization project, launched in 2017 with a planned $16 billion budget, has its own section of the VA’s budget outside the Office of Information and Technology, and its leader reports to the agency’s deputy secretary, Donald Remy. But OI&T is deeply enmeshed in the shift to the same Cerner commercial electronic health record system, providing support for infrastructure development and readiness.”
“At the same time, OI&T is responsible for keeping the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (Vista) operational. For now, most patient care is handled through Vista; the Cerner product is up and running at the Mann Grandstaff Medical Center in Spokane, Wash., and a few more deployments are scheduled in the near term.”
“‘We’re going to be using VistA for a period of time, and during that we can’t falter on delivering great care to veterans,’ DelBene said on a Feb. 17 call with reporters. ‘So I think of Vista as a system that we absolutely have to continue to modernize. The health care landscape changes, and VistA needs to change and continue with the great support as it has had before…'”
“Funding is a big issue for VistA, in part because its costs are difficult to measure. The homegrown application now has 130 separate instances in use at different VA facilities.”
“Because of the way the legacy system has sprawled into multiple systems, ‘VA lacks a comprehensive definition of VistA and cannot accurately report VistA costs,’ the agency stated in its 2022 budget request…” Read the full article here.
Source: Vista modernization still a priority at VA, but funding is a question – By Adam Mazmanian, February 18, 2022. FCW.
