Page 6 - FCW, May/June 2018

Trending
Democrats
want VA’s acting
CIO removed
A group of congressional Democrats has asked the Department of Veterans Affairs to remove its acting CIO because of allegations of professional misconduct.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee; Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), ranking member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee; and nine other lawmakers wrote in a May 15 letter to Deputy VA Secretary Thomas Bowman that there are “serious character concerns that should disqualify” acting CIO Camilo Sandoval from holding the top technology post at the agency.
The lawmakers noted current legal complaints against Sandoval stemming from allegations of harassment during his work on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The letter also notes that “previous conflicts” at the Treasury Department and the Veterans Health Administration “raise serious red flags and indicate a history of rampant interpersonal conflicts with co-workers.”
The lawmakers also complained that Sandoval was involved with Cambridge Analytica while working on the Trump campaign.
That firm, which recently declared bankruptcy, improperly captured profile data on 87 million people and eventually shared that information with the Trump campaign.
The lawmakers also want the VA to pick up the pace on hiring. They cited the recent resignations of 40 senior staffers and the 553 vacancies in the Office of Information and Technology as “effectively stalling operations in essential areas.”
A VA spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
— Adam Mazmanian
37% of federal domains still don’t use https
VA signs $10 billion deal with Cerner
Almost a year after the Department of Veterans Affairs announced a plan to sole-source its electronic health record modernization effort to Cerner, acting VA Secretary Robert Wilkie signed a $10 billion contract with the company in May.
“This is one of the largest IT contracts in the federal government, with a ceiling of $10 billion over 10 years,” Wilkie said in a statement. “And with
a contract of that size,
you can understand why
former Secretary [David]
Shulkin and I took some
extra time to do our due
diligence and make sure
the contract does what the
president wanted.”
$500 million of which will be used for a down payment to Cerner, according to former VA officials familiar with the contract.
Infrastructure updates and program management will likely add another $6 billion to the project’s total cost, and Congress is expected to supply $1.4 billion in fiscal 2019 to support the
project.
The decision comes as
DOD’s implementation of the MHS Genesis EHR system at three sites in the Pacific Northwest is on pause while officials address problems that have rendered the system unfit for use, according to an internal oversight report.
Wilkie alluded to ongoing problems with the system in a statement, noting that “VA and DOD are collaborating closely to ensure lessons learned at DOD sites will be implemented in future deployments at
DOD as well as VA.”
VistA will continue to operate until
the migration to the Cerner system has been completed, a process that could take as long as a decade.
— Adam Mazmanian
The VA, the largest
integrated health care
system in the United States,
covers more than 9 million beneficiaries at more than 1,200 sites, including 170 large medical centers. The effort to replace VA’s homegrown VistA system with a commercial solution is the largest such effort of its kind to date.
Cerner is also supplying the software for the Defense Department’s new EHR system. The VA has $782 million in its fiscal 2018 budget for the project, about
Robert Wilkie
John Conley
@JohnConley247
Francisco Salguero @USDA & Todd Schroeder @salesforce talk w/ @TroySchneider on how digital platforms are empowering business & mission stakeholders @fcwnow #DigitalTransformation
8:01 AM - 17 May 2018
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6 May/June 2018 FCW.COM