Concern has emerged surrounding how the electronic health record (EHR) system will interact with the Ann Arbor hospital’s crucial medical research mission. As a result, the Veteran’s Association (VA)this week announced a further postponement of the EHR rollout inside the Ann Arbor Hospital System until late 2023 or early the following year. This likely derives from worries about how medical research systems interact with health IT. Since its implementation at five locations in October two years ago, the Oracle Cerner EHR has experienced significant performance concerns, including frequent outages that have directly impacted US Veterans in a negative fashion. This delay follows a previous announcement from VA in June of last year, to push back the launch of its EHR platform from early 2022 to 2023 to ensure that all system problems are fixed before a they rolled out to their full target market. The VA’s new EHR system is now projected to take longer to install than initially thought when this announcement was made, and additionally will cost at least ten billion dollars more than reported. The project is expected to be delayed by one to two full years. In a release co-ordinated with FedScoop, the Secretary for Health Dr. Shereef Elnahal suggested that the issues will expand further than only the Ann Arbor Hospital: “So there are many VA medical centers that are heavy with clinical research because of their academic affiliations…And so those centers will need this research functionality. It’s not just an issue with the Ann Arbor Hospital.”
“He has a team focused on this and our agency is regularly engaged with interagency discussions after major cybersecurity incidents. And we are always trying to be proactive in limiting that risk,”
In recent years, VistA has successfully supported various clinical environments and healthcare systems around the United States. These systems range from smaller sized clinics that specialize in outpatient care under one subsection of the industry, to large scale medical entities with a huge annual intake of inpatient populations and their accompanying specialties, such as dermatology or surgery, are another. These systems emphasize clinically pertinent record keeping that enhances clinical and administrative judgment, thereby enhancing patient care.
