VA chief swears off software development

For the past year or more at congressional hearings and public appearances, senior officials from the Department of Veterans Affairs have been warming up to the idea of moving to commercial software for electronic health records, scheduling, acquisitions and other core business processes.

At an evening hearing of the House Veterans Affairs Committee held March 7, VA chief Dr. David Shulkin made his most pointed commitment to date on the topic.

"I've come to the conclusion that VA building its own software products and doing its own software dev inside is not a good way to pursue this," Shulkin said. "We need to move toward commercially tested products."

This is the strongest indication yet that VA is going to move off of its homegrown electronic health record system, Vista, and adopt one of the commercial systems.

"We should focus on the things veterans need us to focus on and work with companies that know how to do [IT systems] better than we do," Shulkin said.

At the same time, he acknowledged that lawmakers have been down this road before with VA, and he urged them to stay aggressive in their oversight.

"I don't want you to stop worrying until we actually do something to give you confidence that we have this right," Shulkin said.

Randy Williamson, the lead on health care issues at the Government Accountability Office, noted that even with a commercial health records system, VA would face the challenge of integrating with Department of Defense systems and private hospital technology.

"It's not a slam dunk," Williamson said, but noted that he thought technology was "the number one issue" holding back VA.

Rep. Julia Brownley (D-Calif.), whose questioning elicited Shulkin's statement, said that VA tech, "still feels like we're driving a Model-T down a L.A. freeway, trying to keep up with the Teslas and the BMWs."