After forty minutes of debate, the House of Representatives passed Senator Elizabeth Dole’s 21st Century Veterans Healthcare and Benefits Improvement Act on Monday evening.
The original section, which dealt with electronic medical records, was missing from the text.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs announced that the “flagship veterans package,” which focused on increasing employment for veterans, improving Veterans Affairs’ community care program, removing roadblocks to disability benefits and improving care options, overwhelmingly had bipartisan support.
“For nearly two years, we have been listening to the veteran community to identify the gaps within VA services to build a VA that meets the needs of today’s community and puts veterans – not the government bureaucracy – at the center of it system,” said the chairman of the committee. , Rep. Mike Bost, R-Illinois, said in a statement.
However, the bill submitted on May 14 states Title V – proposed as the Electronic Health Record Program Restructure, Enhance, Strengthen and Empower Technology Act of 2024 or the EHR Program RESET Act – included protections for veterans’ personal information and established several implementation and reporting requirements that will strengthen oversight of the beleaguered Oracle Cerner would have enlarged EPD through ‘appropriate congressional committees’.
“The Secretary shall submit to the appropriate committees of Congress a certification, including supporting data, that the metrics described in section… demonstrate an overall improvement in each measurement period during the period beginning on the date of enactment of this Act and ends on the date the certification under this section is made,” the deleted language from the original bill states.
Notably, a provision was removed that could have resulted in a dramatic shift in the delivery of the VA’s new EHR:
“Beginning on the date that is two years after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs may not exercise any option periods or optional duties or renew contracts to carry out the (ECtHR) unless prior to the date that is two years after the date of entry into force of this law,”
The bill went to the Senate on Tuesday.
THE BIG TREND
Senators called for new oversight provisions in Oracle’s contract review and asked the VA to use last year’s revised contract structure to hold the vendor accountable for software coding errors and other issues that compromise the quality and security of its EHR implementations.
“We encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity provided by the new contract structure to reassess terms and add additional liability and oversight provisions to protect veterans and taxpayers,” Senators Jon Tester, D-Montana, Patty Murray , D-Washington, and Sherrod Brown , D-Ohio, said in their May 6 message letter to Tanya Bradsher, VA Assistant Secretary.
In a recent audit, the VA Office of Inspector General found that action is still needed to limit risks to veterans in the VA’s care, caused by a lack of consistent response and weaknesses in several controls that regulate management and monitoring of the EPD configuration.
Last week, President-elect Donald J. Trump nominated former Rep. Doug Collins, a Republican from Georgia, to take over as VA secretary.
ON THE RECORD
“This is an important milestone for our nation’s veterans, caregivers, survivors and their families. The strong bipartisan passage in the House of Senator Elizabeth Dole’s 21st Century Veterans Healthcare and Benefits Improvement Act is a fitting tribute to Senator Dole’s legacy of advocacy and service,” said Steve Schwab, CEO of the Elizabeth Dole Foundation, in the House Committee statement on Veterans’ Affairs.
“We are very grateful to the leadership in the House of Representatives and look forward to the swift passage of this legislation in the Senate. We must get this signed into law to create meaningful change for those who have given so much to our nation.”
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.