With the Department of Veterans Affairs electronic health records modernization contract up for the first of four annual renegotiations, senators serving on the VA Committee sent a letter to Tanya Bradsher, the VA deputy secretary, pointed out that there have been more errors this year and that VA employees are ” not getting the systems they need.”
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
Responding to the February EHR software release of pharmacy-focused upgrades containing code errors, lawmakers asked the agency to add “additional accountability provisions and monitoring”.
“The Department must take all possible steps to ensure VA is receiving the services it has purchased at a fair price and that Oracle Health is complying with its commitments,” said Sen. Jon Test, D -Montana, Patty Murray, D-Washington, and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said in a May 6 letter.
In February, David Case, deputy inspector general at the VA Office of Inspector General, provided the House Veterans Affairs Committee’s subcommittee on technology modernization with an overview of software coding flaws. resulting in widespread transmission of incorrect unique drug identifiers from new EHR locations to legacy locations. EHR sites go through the agency’s health data repository during a February 15 hearing on the safety and effectiveness of the Oracle system.
While lawmakers acknowledged in the letter that there have been some improvements in performance over the past 12 months, they expressed concern that significant challenges remaining affecting veteran care remain .
“These factors and the corresponding penalties have resulted in Oracle Health crediting the government with more money for default over the past 12 months than under the previous contract,” the senators noted.
However, “Oracle Health’s delivery of the so-called ‘Block 10’ software release is not yet complete.”
“We encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity provided by the new contract structure to reconsider terms and add additional accountability and oversight provisions to protect veterans,” they told Bradsher. soldiers and taxpayers.
BIGGER TREND
Many congressional lawmakers have questioned whether the VA’s Oracle Cerner system, whose implementation is currently suspended, is fundamentally flawed, and some want to eliminate it.
Meanwhile, Denis McDonough, secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, told the full House VA Committee last month that the Oracle Cerner EHR implementation will continue into 2025.
“VA is seeing incremental but accelerating progress because it solves problems that clinicians and other end users are facing, and because it optimizes the current state of the system.” EHR system to ensure the enterprise-wide foundation is in place for success as implementation continues,” he said in a statement on VA’s Budget Request for FY 2025 and 2026.
The backlash over Oracle Health’s staggering roadblocks in delivering the VA’s EHR has gone unnoticed beyond legislatures, and its $28 billion purchase of Cerner in 2022 has left nearly a dozen guests. Cerner’s major sales were lost and sales fell, leading to thousands of job cuts, Bloomberg reported May 9.
Last year, Mike Sicilia, executive vice president of Oracle Global Industries, said in an email Healthcare IT news that the renegotiated contract not only reflects a commitment to veterans’ health care but also reflects Oracle’s “complete confidence in our technology.”
On May 3, Oracle announced the final commissioning of the Department of Defense’s EHR, MHS GENESIS, at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Healthcare Center in Chicago, and with it, Oracle’s EHR will operate and operate at all DoD installations around the world.
ON PROFILE
“As your May 2024 contract negotiations conclude, we ask that you provide us with a summary of the new terms and enforcement provisions as well as a summary of how the department has used May 2023 agreement to achieve better results,” Mr. Murray, the examiner, and Brown requested in the letter.
Andrea Fox is a senior editor at Healthcare IT News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
