“In July 2022, VA made the decision to delay deployment to the Boise VA Medical Center, promising to dig deeper into our readiness for deployments and address feedback from our frontline users – resulting in our October 13, 2022, announcement that we would delay upcoming deployments until June 2023, while we underwent an aggressive “assess & address” period to diagnose and fix problems.
After that announcement, VA leadership established the EHRM Sprint Project Team, a collaborative, multidisciplinary, enterprise-wide team to assess what needed to be fixed before we went live again and ensure that our deployments are successful going forward.
In addition to identifying the integrated solutions needed to ensure patient safety, VA took a hard look at how we as an enterprise might make better, faster decisions about the configuration of our new EHR, readiness for “go-live,” and how we deliver care to Veterans in VA – to better meet the needs of our Veterans and health care providers.
The Sprint Team’s report is now complete. Based on this report, we are implementing changes in our structure for decision-making and the processes for “go-live” decisions.
The report also recommended specific solutions to issues critical to patient care, for example:
- Accuracy, enterprise standardization, and reliability of data collected for upload to the new system in Data Collection Workbooks. This includes extra checks to ensure that the right data is uploaded.
- Management of clinical and administrative orders. This includes ensuring that when a VA employee needs to place an order for a Veteran, they can easily find the right order and it goes where it needs to go.
- Standardization of EHR Naming conventions, including for locations, to ease cognitive burden and better support VA’s enterprise scale…” Access the full report here.
