It’s always difficult to integrate a new piece of technology into a healthcare organization, particularly when it’s something as all-encompassing as an electronic medical records system. It’s even more difficult when your health system is the size of the Department of Veterans Affairs. The ongoing rollout of Cerner’s EHR at the VA has been a struggle, and criticism is coming from all sides.
Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers is asking the VA to delay the Cerner implementation at her local Walla Walla VA Medical Center after seeing poor progress at the Mann-Grandstaff location, also in her state of Washington. The location has been live on the new EHR for over a year and McMorris Rodgers has been voicing concerns with the modernization project for just as long. In March of last year, she wrote a letter to the VA identifying issues with patient portals, training, and prescription filing.
The newest letter, which asks for the delay says that while system outages have improved (a problem not even singled out in the first criticism), the other issues have persisted. Until the problems have been satisfactorily resolved, she says that she will delay the release of the new system. As of now though, it’s still scheduled to be implemented in the next several weeks.
It starts to feel like a pile on when you see that last week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report criticizing the quality of the data that was migrated into the new system. The GAO has also been highlighting issues with the modernization project and previously recommended pausing deployments until high severity issues could be redressed. Kinks in the workflow are one thing, and can ideally be ironed out in time with dedicated training and software experts, but it’s an incredible struggle to be shaky about the accuracy of your data when you’re trying to refine your processes.
Nevertheless, deployments remain on the schedule (see page 10), including 11 that are scheduled for 2022.
The struggle for accurate data is one we’ve seen throughout healthcare and not just when organizations are migrating to new systems. Every day, hospitals receive paper, faxed, and scanned documents that require slow and error-prone manual entry to populate discrete data fields or they’re simply attached to the medical record as an image that clinicians must read to find what they’re looking for. If they’re lucky, the image file will at least be labeled as its correct document type.
Extract’s HealthyData software automatically knows what your incoming documents are, knows the data you want from them, and can populate it directly in your EHR. If you’d like to ensure that your data is where it should be for you and your clinicians, please reach out and we’d be happy to show you how it all works.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.