Department of Veterans Affairs on Monday announced that it has plans to follow the leads of DoD (Department of Defense) in order to acquire a commercial off-the-shelf EHR (electronic health record) system from Cerner. The plan even got approval from the IT healthcare groups and the stakeholders as well.
Cerner EHR approved by Veterans Affairs stakeholders
Veterans Affairs decision to replace their decades-old legacy VistA (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture) with Cerner’s Millennium EHR, which is also being implemented by Department of Defense has a symmetry and even logic to it.
What David Kibbe, MD of DirectTrust has to say?
David Kibbe, MD, president and CEO of DirectTrust said, ‘The Department of Veterans Affairs’ selection of Cerner to develop its electronic health records system is wonderful news for the U.S. veterans and their families’.
Kibbe added, ‘This is also a banner day for the DirectTrust community, as Cerner has been a champion of Direct as a national standard for ubiquitous, easy, secure, interoperable health records exchange’. He further added, ‘The choice of Cerner as its EHR makes it that much more convenient and economical for Direct exchange and messaging to become a major source of interoperable health information exchange between the federal agencies, particularly the Defense Department and the VA medical facilities, and hospitals and medical clinics in the private sector using Direct exchange through their own EHRs’.
Achieving Interoperability
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The Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense have a complicated EHR history. The two federal agencies in 2013 have scrapped a joint effort in order to develop a single system called integrated electronic health record (iEHR) system. However, according to Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, MD, the agencies’ success in achieving the interoperability has been mixed at best.
Shulkin said, ‘To date, VA and DoD have not adopted the same EHR system—instead, VA and DoD have worked together for many years to advance EHR interoperability between their many separate applications—at the cost of several hundred millions of dollars—in an attempt to create a consistent and accurate view of individual medical record information’.
He added, ‘While we have established interoperability between VA and DoD for key aspects of the health record, seamless care is fundamentally constrained by ever-changing information sharing standards, separate chains of command, complex governance, separate implementation schedules that must be coordinated to accommodate those changes from separate program offices that have separate funding appropriations, and a host of related complexities requiring constant life-cycle maintenance’.
Consequently, Shulkin reached to the conclusion that if these departments remained on 2 different systems, then they would continue to face significant interoperability challenges.
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Date: June 13, 2017