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Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont. ), who is the most sensible Republican on a generation oversight subcommittee on Veterans Affairs Canada, filed a bill Friday to scrap the VA’s more than $20 billing program to modernize electronics. Health record formula used by nine million veterans
The bill is titled: “To End Veterans Affairs Electronic Medical Records Modernization Program. The full text was posted online, but the bill’s target echoes comments by Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill. ), the Veterans Affairs Committee, who warned in July 2022 that he opposed pulling the plug on the technology contract “if there is no major progress by early next year. “
Bost is one of the co-sponsors of the legislation, which was referred to the House Veterans Affairs Committee.
FCW emailed Rosendale’s and the committee to locate the bill’s full contents, but did not receive the text.
The bill came days after VA’s Oracle Cerner formula pilot in Spokane, Washington, suffered a service outage due to updates to the entire formula made through the Department of Defense.
The VA hired Cerner on a single-source basis in 2018 to provide the same electronic advertising fitness record that was implemented through the Department of Defense to share records and collaborate between DOD and VA medical services. The program was budgeted first at $16 billion over 10 years, with $10 billion for Cerner and the rest for infrastructure upgrades and program management.
Cerner acquired through Oracle for $28. 3 billion in a deal reached in June 2022.
But the implementation and migration of fitness records were temporarily hampered by software issues and technical issues, which proved more confusing during the onset of the pandemic. Several oversight bodies have estimated that VA has more than $20 billion on the books for the program.
A July 2022 report from the VA Office of Inspector General found that fitness registration software sent 11,000 clinical orders to an application queue with incomplete routing data and failed to alert doctors that the orders had arrived at their intended destination.
As a result, the report noted that the error “put patients at risk for incomplete care and caused harm to patients” to only about 150 veterans.
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