The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense on Saturday unveiled a new interoperable electronic capability (EHR) on the Captain James A. Lovell (Lovell CHF Canada) on the north side of Chicago.
The Lovell Federal Health Care Center is the Department of Defense’s newest start-up for the new Oracle-Cerner EHR, which it calls MHS Genesis. The Department of Defense has rolled out the new EHR at all of its locations in the United States and around the world.
However, the VA has implemented the Oracle-Cerner EHR at five sites. A full rollout would take it to more than 170 VA medical centers. The Lovell Center is the VA’s most complex EHR deployment to date.
VA announced an indefinite freeze on new Oracle-Cerner EHR releases in April 2023. The branch says the existing “reboot” era will only end when persistent formula outages are resolved and VA sites are already in Oracle-Cerner EHR. show forward performance.
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Neil Evans, acting program executive director for the VA EHR Modernization Integration Office, told reporters on Friday that the VA’s ability to resume EHR implementation will depend, in large part, on the good fortune of the system launch at CHF Chf.
“This really has been a part of the reset for us, and frankly, is a part of our path to restarting deployment across the rest of deployment, as we learn from this deployment,” Evans said.
The Lovell Center provides complex medical care to more than 75,000 people a year. This includes 25,000 veterans a year, more than 10,000 TRICARE members, and 30,000 Navy recruits.
The facility includes a 300-bed hospital and VA outpatient clinics in the greater Chicago area.
“It’s attractive to commission a more complex site, with a higher volume of inpatients, a broader set of specialties, etc. ,” Evans said. “We are going to learn in more complex facilities. “
A total of 3200 VA and DoD workers provide care for veterans at the facility. So far, CHF Canada has been running on legacy VA and DoD EHR systems.
“There have been situations that call for a joint installation with two electronic fitness logs,” Evans said.
Meanwhile, all five VA sites that already have Oracle-Cerner EHRs in place are showing improved performance.
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“From a technical point of view, we’re in a great position and we’re doing very well,” he said.
Evans said it has been 319 days since Oracle-Cerner EHR experienced its last full formula outage. He said VA is also seeing an easing in incidents affecting individual end users, such as freezes, crashes and delays.
The Lovell Center was created in October 2010, by merging the former North Chicago VA Medical Center and the former Naval Health Clinic Great Lakes.
The facility provides health care to active duty military members, family members, retired military members, naval recruits, naval students and veterans in the North Chicago area.
Evans called Saturday’s commissioning “the culmination of a long journey” to prepare the Lovell Center for the new EHR.
“We have been making improvements over the course of the reset for our five live sites. But evaluating those, and understanding those, at a more complex site, we think, will be more important,” he said.
VA says it won’t plan any further VA EHR deployments until officials are happy that the new EHR is working perfectly at all existing sites and is in a condition to be used by veterans and VA physicians at long-term sites.
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In preparation for the commissioning of the Lovell Center, Evans, VA has made “significant changes” to its EHR training.
“In a transition to an electronic fitness log, it’s about how to help end users adopt the new solution, and part of that is training, learning how formula works,” he said.
VA employees, he added, have received computer-based, instructor-led education, as well as “super-user” education — “people who have been briefed and said, ‘I’m excited for my peers to learn about this new system. ‘. ‘»
Evans said the VA has also implemented “learning labs” to prepare doctors to use the new EHR.
“They were able to come and see in a test environment and practice in a test environment, the work, the series of steps that they would do in their normal job,” he said.
Bill Tinston, director of the Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization (FEHRM) office, said DoD personnel have also helped the VA prepare for the Lovell FHCC go-live.
“Bringing that expertise is going to be a great advantage, and it’s one of the advantages to being able to do this jointly. In the end, we do it jointly, so that we get the best outcome for the Americans that we serve here. But for the users, they’ll be in a better position, because they’ll have their peers there, helping them through the process of adopting and getting their jobs done, which is what this is all about,” Tinston said.
Oracle-Cerner has provided several recent pharmacy-related updates to the EHR. Those upgrades are in place at the five VA sites already using the EHR, but Evans said they won’t go into effect at the Lovell Center just yet.
“We made a resolution (it was actually a clinical resolution, founded in the VA pharmacy communities) to ask that the function not be transmitted until it was totally and absolutely 100 percent solved,” he said. “We are now at a point where we have provided more education to CHF Canada’s pharmacy staff, so that they are prepared and perceive what paintings they want to do in the absence of this update. . . We were at a point where the site is, frankly, and in the position that they will be for this kind of transition.
Jory Heckman is a reporter for the Federal News Network and covers issues with the U. S. Postal Service. The U. S. Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, big data, and technology.