VA Secretary: Oracle Health EHR rollout to resume in 2025
Denis McDonough, secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, told the House VA Committee Thursday that the progress of the EHR program RESET Act 2023 – first introduced a year ago – will help address some of the challenges of Oracle Health’s electronic health record rollout and enable broader deployments in 2025.
WHY IT MATTERS
As numerous VA budget requests were discussed during the four-hour congressional session, lawmakers asked about some health IT specifics — such as funding to continue the agency’s EHR modernization program, health IT preparedness infrastructure and more.
“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.” McDonough said in one rack on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs budget request for fiscal years 2025 and 2026.
The Biden administration made the VA ECHR one of its national health care priorities last year and proposed $1.9 billion to support the project.
In March, the signed Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2024 finally allocated $1.3 billion to the VA ECtHR, but authorized Congress to withhold 25% based on efforts to solve past problems, Next Government reported.
In the past, some lawmakers wanted to put an end to Oracle Cerner’s troubled rollout, which ultimately led to further congressional oversight of the promised funding.
McDonough confirmed Thursday that the FY25 budget of $894 million supports the Oracle reset and funding of the six VA sites currently using the new EHR.
During questions, Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Florida, said she was concerned that a dramatic cut — half of the FY24 budget — would jeopardize the VA’s ability to move beyond the reset of the program to implementation. will live at additional VA care locations next year.
“We’re not going to be in a reset forever,” McDonough responded. He said he expects to hold talks before the end of the year to move beyond the ECtHR reset and schedule go-lives in 2025.
She asked him how they would be paid, and he replied that they would be paid with three years of existing financing.
McDonough also called the proposed VA budgets for FY25 and FY26 a “maintenance budget,” but emphasized that a single health record – and one that communicates with the Department of Defense EHR – is needed for the entire VA health system.
THE BIG TREND
Last year, the VA announced a renegotiated contract with Oracle that includes significant financial credits to the agency if the vendor fails to meet key performance metrics.
“Oracle Cerner’s electronic medical record program is deeply flawed – causing problems for medical staff and posing significant risks to patient safety,” Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., said in 2023 as he proposed legislation to create a to put an end to the modernization of the VA EPD.
Following a series of outages and incidents that harmed patients, the VA’s Office of Inspector General has conducted multiple investigations into possible system errors.
The agency recently completed one of the investigations: pharmacy-related patient safety issues following a report of a prescription backlog at the VA Central Ohio Healthcare System in Columbus, Ohio, which occurred after the Oracle EHR went live in April 2022.
OIG flagged problems with the active medication list in the VA EHR in a statement to the House Veterans Committee’s Technology Modernization Subcommittee during a Feb. 15 hearing on the safety and efficacy of the beleaguered EHR.
The watchdog agency said if veterans received treatment at one of five sites using the department’s Oracle Health EHR and then received treatment at a site using the old Vista EHR, their medication information may be incorrect.
OIG has provided VA with more than 70 corrective action recommendations since April 2020, David Case, OIG deputy inspector general, said in a statement to the subcommittee.
ON THE RECORD
“VA recognizes that an updated (VA ECtHR) deployment schedule is critical to demonstrating commitment and will provide that schedule to the committee once it is established,” McDonough said in a statement to the House Veterans Affairs Committee.
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.