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DVA Scraps Home Grown EHR Systems, Opts For OTS Replacement

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday June 06 2017, @11:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the standardized-formats dept.

NotSanguine writes:

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) secretary David Shulkin announced a major overhaul of the department's Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems.

The department will scrap its in-house developed EHR systems, known as VistA in favor of MHS GENESIS, the EHR system in use by the U.S. Department of Defense.

MHS GENESIS is based on the Cerner Millenium API. For those of you who will ask, no, Cerner Millenium is *not* open source.

VistA, the current DVA system was originally conceived as a "paperless" health records management system in the early 1970s, developed and implemented by DVA and other government agencies, both in the United States and in a number of other countries including Finland, Egypt and Germany. VistA is in the public domain

So what say you, Soylentils? Does it make sense to throw out decades of development on a platform both widely used and in the public domain? Should the government be doing its own software development?

Are you a government contractor doing software development? If so, how might this and/or similar actions affect you?

Other Coverage:
White House press briefing/announcement from Secretary Shulkin
Healthcare IT News
Defense One [behind script wall]
Kansas City Star
FCW

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday June 07 2017, @12:13PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 07 2017, @12:13PM (#521853) Journal

    It is unlikely DVA is going to spring for someone to be a data-entry person who sits there and enters just what the doctors wants, while the doctor is examining you (and do you want that person in the room while the doctor is examining you?). And it would be worse if the doctor has to dictate after the examine to someone else to type in (stuff will be missed/forgotten/incorrect).

    We just don't have the technology right now, to efficiently get all the data into a computer system in a usable way, without significant effort.

    Even a system of doctor-scribble on paper dropped into the inbox of the transcriptionist puts the doctor 90% doctoring/10% writing and the transcriptionist doing ~100% data entry. This is a pretty common practice outside the VA, works really well, and doesn't require anything to be invented or even any great degree of thought.

    Benefits: - transcriptionists better at operating the system, eliminating many of the tech support headaches that AC complained about above in the thread
    - doctors less likely to get frustrated and leave the VA
    - doctors' time better used so they can see more patients--and the VA really, really needs that.

    When we have the technology to magically capture the doctor's thoughts into a relational database, as you mention, then we'll move on to that and the transcriptionists will sadly have to find other work.

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