VA to Wrap Health Records Review ‘In a Few Weeks,’ Secretary Says

The Veterans Affairs Department will continue to partner with the Defense Department and commercial software developer Cerner in the rollout of its $16 billion electronic health records modernization, but changes in the way the agency is managing the rollout are coming, Secretary Denis McDonough said Tuesday.

Speaking before the House Veterans Affairs Committee, McDonough said a strategic review he ordered in March on the rollout should conclude “in a few weeks,” but has already identified governance and other issues plaguing the process.

McDonough ordered the review when issues surfaced following the agency’s first deployment of the Cerner Millennium health records software in October in Spokane, Washington. VA has been working for more than two years with Cerner to deploy a single health records system across the agency that will be interoperable with the Cerner-built systems in development by the Defense Department and the Leidos Partnership for Defense Health.

“We are not revisiting the relationship with DOD on this, but we do have to have much more candor with each other and ourselves frankly about what precisely we need and require from the Cerner system,” McDonough said. “We are not changing out from the Cerner system, let me reiterate that.”

However, McDonough said the department’s training and requirements development, along with its governance and management of the program, “needs some work.”

“We are coming to the end of looking at this closely. We are looking at structural questions, including how we are structured to oversee this,” McDonough said.

President Joe Biden’s budget request for VA includes $2.7 billion in fiscal 2022 for the electronic health records modernization—part of a 10% increase over fiscal 2021.  

Pressed by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, McDonough said the timing for the department’s next health records deployment—to a site in Columbus, Ohio—is a “big open question for us.”