“Modernizing the Department of Veterans Affairs’ expansive and often fragmented health records system is a challenging order that the agency is approaching using best practices from the Defense Department.”
“Program control director at the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Electronic Health Records Modernization (OEHRM) Fred Mingo discussed the greatest hurdles in the effort.”
“’Making enterprise-wide modernization efforts that are standard and consistent quickly and elegantly was extremely painful,’ Mingo said at the DOD/VA Interoperability Roundtable this week.”
“The greatest hurdles for the VA’s broader EHRM transformation efforts seem to hinge on the sheer variety of health records that would need to be standardized along a single format within a unified database — an IT migration project that has required an exacting and detail-intensive approach…”
“While knowledge and labor intensive, this transformation aligns with the VA’s broader data-sharing goals as well — particularly in facilitating patient care through cleanly transitioning service records from the DOD to the VA’s EHRM database.”
“’This internally solves a lot of our interoperability,’ Mingo added. ‘Within the DOD and VA we’re operating within the same system, we’re in the same data center … we’ve accepted all of the security requirements that go with the Department of Defense’s effort.’”
“Partnering with DOD had additional benefits, particularly in adopting the oversight and experience that went into earlier implementation of the Cerner platform across DOD facilities…” Read the full article here.
Source: VA Taking Methodical Approach to Cerner Implementation – By Adam Patterson, January 31, 2020. GovernmentCIO.
