VA says goodbye to VistA, hello to Cerner for new EHR–and possible impacts (updated)

June 7, 2017 | by

The new sheriff just turned the town upside down. Veterans Affairs’ new Secretary, Dr. David J. Shulkin, as expected moved quickly on the VA’s EHR modernization before the July 1 deadline, and moved to the same vendor that the Department of Defense (DoD) chose in 2015 for the Military Health System, Cerner. VA will adapt MHS GENESIS, based on Cerner Millenium. The rationale is seamless interoperability both with DoD and with private sector community providers and vendors, which base their services on commercial EHRs. The goal is to have one record for a service member through his or her lifetime and to eliminate the transition gap after discharge or retirement. (Transition gaps are also repeated when reservists or National Guard are called up for active duty then returned to their former status.) Another priority for VA is preventing the high rate of suicide among vulnerable veterans.

Updates: VA confirmed that Epic and Leidos will keep the development of the online medical appointment scheduling program, awarded in 2015 and currently in pilot, to be completed in 18 months. The contract is worth $624 million over five years. Wisconsin State Journal  The House Appropriations subcommittee on Veterans Affairs likes the Cerner EHR change. The Senate Veterans Affairs Committee is meeting Wednesday to discuss the VA budget sans the EHR transition. The EHR numbers are expected to be sooner rather than later. POLITICO Morning eHealth 

Dr. Shulkin is well acquainted with the extreme need for a modernized, interoperable system serving the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), having been on the US Senate Hot Grill for some years as Undersecretary of Health for VA. The foundation for the move from homegrown VistA to Cerner was laid last year during the prior Administration through an August RFI for a COTS (commercial off the shelf) EHR [TTA 12 Aug 16] and in later hearings. “Software development is not a core competency of VA” and it has been obvious in system breakdowns like scheduling, maintaining cybersecurity and the complex interoperability between two different systems. To move to Cerner immediately without a competition, which took DoD over two years, Dr. Shulkin used his authority to sign a “Determination and Findings” (D&F) which provides for a public health exception to the bidding process. The value of the Cerner contract will not be determined for several months.

For those sentimental about VistA, he acknowledged the pioneering role of the EHR back in the 1970s, but that calls for modernization started in 2000 with seven ‘blue ribbon’ commissions and innumerable Congressional hearings since. He understated the cost in the failed efforts on interoperability with DoD’s own AHLTA system, VA’s own effort at a new architecture, and modernizing the outpatient system. This Editor tallied these three alone at $3 billion in GAO’s reckoning [‘Pondering the Squandering’, TTA 27 July 13]. 

It is still going to take years to implement–no quick fixes in something this massive, despite the urgency.

  • Both MHS and VA will be running two systems at once for years (more…)

Cerner’s takeoff delayed on DOD’s new EHR, MHS Genesis

October 20, 2016 | by

The new $4.3 billion US Department of Defense EHR, jointly developed by Cerner and Leidos, has taken another delay from the aggressive rollout schedule set in April.  The original test start date was 6 December at the Fairchild Air Force Base hospital in Spokane, Washington (state) and the Oak Harbor Naval Hospital on Washington’s Whidbey Island. Back in early September, it was reported that it would be delayed by at least a few months for technical reasons (Federal News Radio and Healthcare IT News). The rara avis in the latter is a mention of major dental supplier Henry Schein–along with Accenture, they were part of the award, but very much a junior partner in providing the dental EHR. (Leidos release)

The latest update on the start of MHS Genesis is February 2017 for Fairchild AFB and June for Oak Harbor. Healthcare IT News

VA’s moves spell the end of the homegrown EHR

August 12, 2016 | by

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is formally reaching out to the private sector to explore switching from its current, pioneering EHR system, VistA (also referred to as CPRS, Computerized Patient Record System) to a commercial system. Their ‘feeler’ is an August 5 and 8 notice in FedBizOpps.gov titled 99–TAC-16-37877 * RFI – VHA supporting COTS EHR REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI), Solicitation Number: VA11816N1486. This requests information on business support for transitioning to a commercial-off-the-shelf system (COTS–don’t governments love acronyms?–Ed.) and closes 26 August, which is not a lot of time even for an RFI.

VHA has been under extreme pressure from Congress to modernize its EHR, lately in July hearings before the Senate Appropriations Committee. EHR replacement is also in line with the Congressionally-mandated, now concluded Commission on Care’s recently published recommendations on a total, top-down reorganization of VHA, including a sweeping reorg of their HIT management. The VHA strategy appears to be that while they are walking down the road to replace VistA and have already spent to assess where they are with KLAS and other EHR consultancies (spending $160,000+ on surveys), they are essentially ‘kicking the can down the road’ to the next administration (POLITICO’s Morning eHealth, 14 July).

Current state is to continue to upgrade VistA through late 2018, though the closely related Department of Defense’s Military Health System is in the long process of cutting its homegrown AHLTA over to Cerner-Leidos as MHS Genesis, awarded last August, with a first trial in the Pacific Northwest later this year (HealthcareITNews, Ed. emphasis). Of course, it will take the VHA years to roll it out; there are close to 9 million veterans enrolled in the closed system that is the VHA.  FCW, Morning eHealth 10 August

Love EHRs or hate them, the sheer size of the VHA and its growing concession that VistA won’t do in caring for American veterans makes it clear that the future of EHRs is in private systems from major developers–a field which is winnowing out to The Few (take that, GE).  (more…)

Cerner win at Defense a crossroads for interoperability (US)

August 4, 2015 | by

Modern Healthcare’s analysis of the Cerner/Leidos/Accenture win of the Department of Defense (DoD) EHR contract focuses on its effect on interoperability. In their view, it’s positive in three points for active military, retirees and their dependents.

* EHR interoperability with the civilian sector is needed because 60-70 percent of the 9.6 million Military Health System beneficiaries—active duty military personnel, retirees and their families—is delivered by providers in the US private sector through Tricare, the military health insurance program.

* A major criticism by Congress and veterans’ groups of both DoD and VA is the lack of interoperability between these systems as well as civilian. Many military members change their status several times during service, and can cycle within a few years as active, Reserve, National Guard and inactive reserve. Records famously get lost, sometimes disastrously.

* It’s a boost to state health information exchanges (HIE) in states with large military bases and also for the CommonWell Health Alliance, an industry group which is establishing EHR interoperability standards.

Less optimistic are some industry observers who see the DoD contract as sidelining resources demanded by Cerner’s civilian hospital clients, and whether realistically they can develop a system to exchange data with every EHR, including dental, and e-prescribing system in the US (and probably foreign as well). Modern Healthcare

US Department of Defense picks Cerner/Leidos/Accenture for $4.3 bn EHR

July 29, 2015 | by

Breaking News Updated  The winner of the massive, potentially ten year contract for the Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization program is defense computer contractor Leidos, which brought in Cerner and Accenture Federal Systems.The DOD announcement mentions only lead contractor Leidos, interestingly under the US Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, San Diego, California. The announcement was released just after 5pm EDT today.

This combination beat the Epic/IBM and the Allscripts/Computer Sciences/HP bids. According to the DOD announcement, “This contract has a two-year initial ordering period, with two 3-year option periods, and a potential two-year award term, which, if awarded, would bring the total ordering period to 10 years. Work will be performed at locations throughout the United States and overseas. If all options are exercised, work is expected to be completed by September 2025. Fiscal 2015 Defense Health Program Research, Development, Test and Evaluation funds in the amount of $35,000,000 will be obligated at the time of award.” Modern Healthcare attended the embargoed press conference this morning and adds in its article that only one-third is fixed cost, with the remainder as ‘cost plus’, which could conceivably run the contract to the $4.33 bn ceiling over the 10 years. The system will be used in 55 military hospitals and 600 clinics, with an initial operational test as early as 2016 (Washington Post) and full rollout by 2023.  Interoperability with private EHR systems was a key requirement (Healthcare IT News).Over the 18 year life cycle, the contract value could be up to $9 bn, according to the WaPo.

The race to replace DOD’s AHLTA accelerated with the final failure to launch a plan to create a joint DOD-VA EHR in March 2013 [TTA 27 July 13], though hopes revived in Congress occasionally during the past two years [TTA 31 Mar].

It is also widely interpreted as a blow to Epic, which has been defensive of late about its willingness to play in the HIT Interoperability sandbox with other EHRs; certainly it cannot make Big Blue, which would undoubtedly have found some way to sell Watson into this, happy.

POLITICO’s Morning eHealth had many tart observations today, mostly pertaining to the belief of some observers that Cerner will be strapped in meeting this Federal commitment and would find it increasingly difficult to innovate in the private sector.

Example–From Micky Tripathi, CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative: “My biggest worry isn’t that Cerner won’t deliver, it’s that DOD will suck the lifeblood out of the company by running its management ragged with endless overhead and dulling the innovative edge of its development teams. There is a tremendous amount of innovation going on in health IT right now. We need a well-performing Cerner in the private sector to keep pushing the innovation frontier. It’s not a coincidence that defense contractors don’t compete well in the private sector, and companies who do both shield their commercial business from their defense business to protect the former from the latter.”