“The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs recently outlined a year of milestones and service improvements, many of them executed with the aid of telehealth services, as it moves forward with its many wide-ranging wave of digitization initiatives.”
“The VA reported that in the last fiscal year, Veterans took advantage of telehealth more than 2.6 million times across the country, with more than 900,000 Veterans now getting care this way.”
“Earlier this month, the VA, with Walmart, opened its latest telehealth pilot site, part of the department’s Accessing Telehealth through Local Area Stations, or ATLAS, initiative, which will provide clinical services including primary care, mental health and social work.”
“The department also announced it has so far successfully transferred 23.5 million Veterans’ health records to a shared data center with the U.S. Department of Defense this year – collectively, more than 78 billion records have been compiled from all VA medical centers to include in this transfer.”
‘These records total 50 terabytes of data storage, and their transfer paves the way for the VA to begin transitioning to to with its new Cerner electronic health record, with go-live scheduled for March 2020 at five initial operating capability sites.”
“When the new EHR completes implementation, it will replace the 130 plus instances of the current VistA system in a streamlined solution that also powers DoD’s Military Health System…” Read the full article here.
Source: VA looks back on 2019, sees ‘year of improvements and continued progress’ – By Nathan Eddy, December 20, 2019. Healthcare IT News.
