VA Needs Help Eliminating Paper Health Records

Despite the fact that the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture electronic health record system has been around for decades, it took the Veterans Affairs Department until last Friday to take some action to get rid of its paper medical files.

The VA says it needs some help with a File Room Reduction/Closure Services project to eliminate the paper records for 9 million patients stored in 139 medical centers nationwide.

VA has initially targeted 22 facilities for this project, each of which stores between 1,000 feet (1.5 million pages) and 5,000 feet (7.5 million pages) of documents and needs some help scanning and indexing this mass of paper.

One wonders why it took so long to kick off this project.