Page 41 - FCW, July 2017

After 17 years of mulling an integrated electronic health record, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced in June that it plans to sync up with the Defense Department’s commercial EHR sys- tem. The decision marks the beginning of VA’s break from VistA, the homegrown system that has evolved over nearly four decades.
In a June 5 White House briefing, VA Secretary David Shulkin said he hoped to have a contract with Cerner in three to six months. In that time, Shulkin said, VA will be “developing both the implementation plans and the cost of this system so that we can go out and make sure that we’re doing this right and that we have the resources available to do it.”
He added that “VA’s adoption of the same EHR system as DOD will ultimately result in all patient data residing in one common system and enable seamless care between the departments without the manual and electronic exchange and reconciliation of data between two separate systems.”
Shulkin is making the move without market competition, citing the urgency of the matter. The secretary signed a “determination and find- ings” document that allows VA to acquire the MHS Genesis system from Cerner on a sole-source basis.
“This D&F action is only done in particular circumstances when the public interest demands it, and that’s clearly the case here,” Shulkin said. “We can’t wait years, as DOD did in its EHR acquisition process, to get our next-generation EHR in place.”
Shulkin told reporters VA would get the money to acquire and imple- ment the new system and that it would affect the rollout of the medical scheduling tools VA is currently testing. Shulkin has long pledged to move the department out of the software development business and had set a July 1 deadline for making a decision about the future of VA’s EHR system.
He added that by “working with the Department of Defense and... using their planning materials and their change management tools, we will be able to do this much faster than if we had done it alone.”
Christopher Miller, who led the Pentagon’s efforts to procure a com- mercial system, joined VA for a short stint as special adviser to the CIO to help work through the decision. VA’s Office of Information and Technology is also in the process of establishing a program executive office that will coordinate the move to a commercial system.
VistA has a substantial fan base at VA, so Shulkin sought to reassure VA practitioners by noting that the department has unique needs that differ from those of DOD. “VA will not simply be adopting the identical [EHR] that DOD uses, but we intend to be on a similar Cerner platform,” he said.
He added that clinicians will be closely involved in the new system’s implementation, and VA will not abandon its previous work on clinical IT innovation.
Total cost: TBD
There’s no word yet on the cost of the new system, but as Shulkin pointed out, VA is a larger organization than the Military Health System. DOD’s contract with the Leidos-Cerner team is worth $4.3 billion over 10 years, although that amount could go up as DOD’s needs change and officials add new features. One year into the contract, for example, DOD agreed
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AP PHOTO/SUSAN WALSH