VA EHR Systems Faces Major Overhaul
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
$162 Million contract awarded for update to VistA clinical information system.
The Department of Veterans Affairs’ VistA clinical information system will undergo a major update during the next three years under a $162 million contract awarded to ASM Research. The project will support the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) Clinical Application and Enterprise Core Services according to a press release.
VistA is the VA’s award-winning Health Information Technology system, providing an integrated inpatient and outpatient electronic health record to optimize quality medical care for veterans and their families. Work under the contract is designed to strengthen and expand veteran healthcare services and will enable greater interoperability of systems and healthcare records and will meet the highest security standards.
As part of the contract, ASM will update VistA’s Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS), providing a modern, web-based access to patient records. Essentially, it gives clinicians, managers, support staff, and researchers an integrated patient record management system which provides a single interface for physicians to manage patient care and records.
“VistA Enterprise Core Services will modernize the VistA workflow and information access throughout the continuum of patient care for our veterans,” said Jim Traficant, president of ASM Research and a managing director at Accenture Federal Services.
Work under the contract also will help improve data sharing across the VA, including care transitions and implementation of standards of care. ASM will deliver technical architecture, clinical analysis, software development, engineering management, and training to support VistA modernization. This work will help the VA build the next level of patient care capabilities within VistA.
“The VA’s ability to improve data interoperability will have a dramatic effect on the VA’s provision of the quality of care, patient safety and healthcare outcomes,” said John Fraser, ASM Research executive vice president and COO.
Under the new contract, various functions of the EHR will be broken into modular components to take advantage of newer innovations. Currently, one component of VistA cannot be updated or otherwise changed without affecting other components. Decoupling components or functions into separate modules will make it easier to maintain and update specific parts of VistA without the changes touching other parts.
The contract also calls for implementing portals to give secure, role-based access to clinicians, managers, supporting staff and researchers to capture and disclose clinical data. Enhanced security protections that ASM Research is not presently disclosing also are in the works, along with enabling better data sharing across the enterprise.
Unfortunately, the contract, which focuses on clinical applications, does not include work to improve the VA’s much-maligned patient appointment scheduling system.
VistA has been customized considerably over the years by region and individual hospitals and as part of the new contract, how data is captured, managed and presented will become more centralized, Traficant says. Consequently, there is an expectation of more standardization with richer tool sets and more uniform presentation of data.