VA Deploys New EHR Tech At Ohio Clinics
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Officials announced that more interactive training and instructions are included as the VA fights to rollout upgraded EHR systems nationwide.
A new round of electronic health record technology was deployed at the Veterans Affairs Central Ohio Healthcare System in Columbus, Ohio, marking the latest deployment of the beleaguered health record software system.
VA clinics in Ohio that received the new digital database are located in Grove City, Marion, Newark and Zanesville.
The VA’s new EHR rollout has been several years in the making and suffered numerous delays related to cost projection errors, technical difficulties and poor user experiences. These led to delays in the system rollout as well as inquiries from lawmakers as to why implementing a new EHR system has been so arduous.
“This electronic health record rollout is an important step in our progress toward a single instance of a medical record connecting VA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Coast Guard that will provide all our patients with seamless care from active duty to veteran status,” said program executive director Terry Adirim. “With each VA site that adopts this system, we gain momentum. The lessons we carry forward from site to site are refining our rollouts and improving end-user experiences.”
Working off of the user feedback, experts at the VA have created more user-friendly instructions to help clinicians learn how to use the new software. The program office has also added more system demonstrations, workshops and testing events to the EHR curriculum.
The VA’s upgraded EHR system was first deployed at clinics in Spokane and Walla Walla, Washington. Two more EHR systems are scheduled for deployment in June at facilities in Oregon, following the outages reported in clinics in the Pacific Northwest.