VA pours taxpayer dollars down a rathole
The Department of Veterans Affairs' latest attempt to “roll out” the much-touted electronic medical records system, (EHR) at the Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center in Spokane, Washington, ended up with the system crashing and shutting down the entire system at the facility for hours.
This event on March 3 was not just a crash, it was an implosion. VA employees had to revert to pen and paper to try and handle veteran appointments, referrals, prescription requests, and most importantly, mental health care for veterans in need, for over 24 hours. The staff was ordered to “stop using the digital records system until further notice and to assume that all electronic patient data is corrupted/inaccurate.”
VA Secretary Denis McDonough admitted the medical center experienced at least six shutdowns at the April 28 House Veterans Affairs Committee hearing. It did not help that on April 26 the system which McDonough reported “up and running” crashed again in the middle of a House Veterans Affairs hearing to review the situation.
Cerner Corp. of Kansas City, Missouri, was the originator of this albatross for the tidy sum of $10 billion.
The suits at Cerner decided it was time to bail and save themselves and their golden parachutes so on June 8 Cerner was purchased by the tech giant Oracle for $28.3 billion dollars.
Debrorah Hellinger, Oracle’s senior vice president for global corporate communications, stated, “we intend to bring substantially more resources to this program and deliver a modern, state of the art electronic health system that will make the VA the industry standard.”
The VA Inspector General (OIG) is hot on the case and states in a draft report: “the program failed to deliver over 11,000 orders for specialty care, lab work and other services — without alerting health care providers the orders had been lost.”
You the taxpayers, (and veterans are taxpayers), are funding this debacle. The veterans, God help us all, are caught in the whirlpool of VA ineptness ... again.
Lost orders are the same as undelivered mail. Nobody gets the mail and nobody knows you sent the mail in the first place.
Oracle-Cerner states that the orders went into an “unknown queue.” Cerner referred to this kind of “oops” as being in the “parking lot” according to the OIG report of July 8, 2021.
Each year the system is delayed is going to cost the taxpayers an estimated $1.9 billion.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, and other top Democrats on the House and Senate VA panels, “sent a letter to McDonough on June 7 with detailed questions about the more than 50 incidents when the system has been partly or completely unusable.”
The letter further states, “America’s veterans and VA’s employees deserve better than what has been provided to date. It is unreasonable to expect VA employees to perform their jobs when the EHR is unreliable or completely unavailable.”
It is the front-line VA employees who I and other veterans deal with every day, and they have enough to deal with right now with short staffing, extra hours, pay rates that are a disgrace, and they are the ones who must face the veterans not the folks on “Mahogany Row.”
Secretary McDonough stated on May 25: “we’re not continuing practices that would increase risk.” He did not have any plans at that time to delay or halt the Oracle Cerner program.
VA confirmed on Tuesday that further rollouts of the new EHR system has been delayed to at least April 2023.
When I get lousy service from someone I am doing business with, I do not return to spend more of my money with that vendor.
Time to shut it down, turn off the money waterfall to Oracle-Cerner, and listen to the front-line employees and veterans on how to put a workable, reliable and cost-effective system in place.
— This is the opinion of Patricia Wilson, a veteran and a resident of St. Cloud. Her column appears monthly.