With the Veterans Affairs Electronic Health Records Modernization Contract ready for the first of four annual renegotiations, VA committee member senators sent a letter to VA Assistant Secretary Tanya Bradsher noting that this year more mistakes have been made and that VA staff “are not getting the system they need.”
WHY IT MATTERS
In response to a February EHR software release that included pharmacy-focused upgrades with code errors, lawmakers asked the agency to add “additional liability and oversight provisions.”
“The Department must take every step possible to ensure that VA receives the services it purchased at a fair price and that Oracle Health meets its obligations,” said Senators Jon Tester, D-Montana, Patty Murray, D-Washington and Sherrod. Brown, D-Ohio, said in their May 6 post letter.
In February, David Case, deputy inspector general in the VA Office of Inspector General, provided the House Veterans Committee’s Subcommittee on Technology Modernization with an overview of a software coding error that resulted in the widespread transfer of incorrect, unique medication identifiers from new EHR sites to outdated EPD sites. EHR sites through the agency’s health data repository during a Feb. 15 hearing on the safety and efficacy of the Oracle system.
While the lawmakers acknowledged in their letter that there has been some improvement in performance over the past twelve months, they expressed concern that significant challenges remain that impact care for veterans.
“These elements and associated penalties resulted in Oracle Health crediting the government with more money when it failed to perform over the past twelve months compared to the previous contract,” the senators noted.
“However, Oracle Health’s delivery of the so-called ‘Block 10’ software release was incomplete.”
“We encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity provided by the new contract structure to reassess the terms and add additional liability and oversight provisions to protect veterans and taxpayers,” they told Bradsher.
THE BIG TREND
Many lawmakers in Congress have questioned whether the VA’s Oracle Cerner system, a rollout currently on hold, is fundamentally flawed, and some want to scrap it.
Meanwhile, Denis McDonough, secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, told the full House VA Committee last month that the rollout of the Oracle Cerner EHR would resume in 2025.
“VA is seeing incremental but accelerating progress as it addresses the issues that physicians and other end users are experiencing and as it optimizes the current state of the EHR system to ensure the enterprise-wide foundation is in place for success when implementations resume. ” he said in a statement on the VA’s budget request for fiscal years 2025 and 2026.
The backlash against Oracle Health’s staggering roadblocks to delivering the VA’s EHR has not gone unnoticed outside the legislative halls, and Cerner’s $28 billion purchase in 2022 has resulted in nearly a dozen of Cerner’s major lost customers and declining sales that have led to thousands of job losses, Bloomberg reported on May 9.
Last year, Mike Sicilia, executive vice president of Oracle Global Industries, said in an email to Healthcare IT news that the renegotiated contract reflects not only a commitment to veterans’ health care, but also Oracle’s “full confidence in our technology.”
On May 3, Oracle announced the final go-live of the Department of Defense EHR, MHS GENESIS, at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in Chicago, making Oracle’s EHR live and operational at all DoD garrison facilities around the world.
ON THE RECORD
“When your May 2024 contract negotiations are concluded, we request that you provide us with a summary of the new enforcement terms and conditions, as well as a summary of how the Department used the May 2023 agreement to achieve better results,” Tester said, Murray and Brown asked in the letter.
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.