The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Defense Department launched a new, interoperable Electronic Health Record (EHR) on Saturday, at the Capt. James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center (Lovell FHCC) in North Chicago.
The Lovell Federal Health Care Center is DoD’s final go-live site for the new Oracle-Cerner EHR, which it calls MHS Genesis. DoD has now deployed the new EHR at all its sites across the U.S. and internationally.
However, the VA has implemented the Oracle-Cerner EHR at five sites. A full rollout would take it to more than 170 VA medical centers. The Lovell Center is the VA’s most complex EHR deployment to date.
The VA announced an indefinite freeze on new Oracle-Cerner EHR releases in April 2023. The branch says the existing “reboot” era will only end when the ongoing outages of the formula and VA sites, whether Oracle-Cerner EHRs, are resolved. shows improved performance.
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Neil Evans, acting program executive director of VA’s EHR Modernization Integration Office, told reporters Friday that VA’s ability to resume the EHR rollout will depend, in large part, on the success of the system’s launch at the Lovell FHCC.
“It’s part of the reset for us and, frankly, it’s part of our path to restart deployment for the remainder of the deployment, as we were briefed from that deployment,” Evans said.
The Lovell Center provides complex medical care to over 75,000 individuals per year. That includes 25,000 veterans every year, over 10,000 TRICARE enrollees and 30,000 Navy recruits.
The facility is a 300-bed hospital and VA outpatient clinic in the Chicago metropolitan area.
“There’s a price in implementing a more complex site, with a higher volume of inpatients, a broader set of specialties, etc. ,” Evans said. “We’ll learn about more complex facilities. “
A combined staff of 3,200 VA and DoD employees provides care to veterans at the facility. Up until this point, FHCC has been operating with both VA and DoD’s legacy EHR systems.
“There have been demanding situations in a joint facility with two electronic fitness logs,” Evans said.
Meanwhile, the five VA sites already using the Oracle-Cerner EHR are showing improved performance.
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“From a technical point of view, we’re in a great position and we’re doing very well,” he said.
Evans said it’s been 319 days since Oracle-Cerner EHR experienced its last complete formula disage. He said the VA is also seeing relief in incidents that affect individual end users, such as freezes, crashes and delays.
The Lovell Center was established in October 2010, merging the former North Chicago VA Medical Center and the former Great Lakes Naval Health Clinic.
The facility provides health care to active duty military members, family members, retired military members, naval recruits, naval students and veterans in the North Chicago area.
Evans called Saturday’s commissioning “the culmination of a long journey” to prepare the Lovell Center for the new EHR.
“We have been making improvements over the course of the reset for our five live sites. But evaluating those, and understanding those, at a more complex site, we think, will be more important,” he said.
VA says it won’t schedule additional VA EHR deployments until officials are confident that the new EHR is highly functioning at all current sites and ready to deliver for Veterans and VA clinicians at future sites.
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In preparation for the commissioning of the Lovell Center, Evans, VA has made “significant changes” to its EHR training.
“In a transition to an electronic fitness tracker, it’s about how to help end users adopt the new solution, and part of that is through training, learning how the formula works,” he said. he declared.
VA employees, he added, have received computer-based, instructor-led education, as well as education from “superusers” — “people who have been briefed and said, ‘I’m excited for my peers to learn about this new system. ‘. ‘»
Evans said the VA has also implemented “learning labs” to prepare doctors to use the new EHR.
“They were able to come and see in a sand environment and exercise in a sand environment, the work, the series of steps that they would do in their normal job,” he said.
Bill Tinston, director of the federal Office of Electronic Health Records Modernization (FEHRM), said the Department of Defense also helped the VA prepare for approval of the Lovell FHCC.
“Bringing that expertise is going to be a great advantage, and it’s one of the advantages to being able to do this jointly. In the end, we do it jointly, so that we get the best outcome for the Americans that we serve here. But for the users, they’ll be in a better position, because they’ll have their peers there, helping them through the process of adopting and getting their jobs done, which is what this is all about,” Tinston said.
Oracle-Cerner has provided several recent pharmacy-related EHR updates. These updates are available at all five VA sites that already have EHRs, but Evans said they would not possibly go into effect at the Lovell Center at this time.
“We made a resolution (it was a clinical resolution, founded in the VA pharmacy communities) not to implement the feature until it was totally and absolutely 100 percent solved,” he said. He declared. ” We are now at a point where we have provided more education to FHCC pharmacy staff, so that they are prepared and understand what jobs they will want to do in the absence of this update. . . We were at a point where, frankly, the site is, in the position that they’ll be for this kind of transition.
Jory Heckman is a reporter at Federal News Network covering U.S. Postal Service, IRS, big data and technology issues.