Chris Wiedemann, market intelligence senior analyst at McLean, Virginia-based immixGroup shared his insights on the VA’s choice of Cerner to modernize its VistA electronic health record and what spending and resource allocation might look like.
“While a final contract is still pending, “from a market trend standpoint, as far as federal health IT spending goes, we’re keeping as close an eye as everyone else is on the Cerner contract award, whatever the final system design and system architecture ends up looking like,” he said. “Because I think that’s what’s going to shape the health IT market in this fiscal year.””
“Even if a contract were to be announced tomorrow, however, a few wild cards in Washington could potentially slow down the Cerner VA deal’s forward momentum…For one thing, “I think that a shutdown after Dec. 8 is likelier than I thought it was even a few weeks ago,” he said…A government shutdown of, say, two weeks “would have a pretty significant knock-on effect for a project like the Cerner VistA replacement, just because of all the upfront work that’s required to do that, and the amount of upfront capital investment that would be required…”
“The sense that you get just from the coverage is that they have other issues from an appropriations standpoint that they care about more…What if, for instance, the funding necessary to get the project off the ground were to be used as leverage for another project the president is truly passionate about?”
“… a lot of this will hinge on how much the VA, how much stakeholders on the health IT side are bought into this commercial-off-the-shelf migration vision and how much they’re willing to give up of their existing or legacy solution or code base… and depend on how much money the VA is actually able to spend on the project. Secretary Shulkin asked Congress for a substantial chunk of change this past month…”
Source: Federal IT analyst: Federal government shutdown would throw wrench in VA deal with Cerner – By Mike Miliard, December 5, 2017, Healthcare IT News. Read the full article here.
