Top lawmakers on the House and Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs introduced new legislation this week that aims to put an end to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) current Electronic Health Records Modernization (EHRM) program within two years unless improvements are made.
House and Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs leaders Chairman Mike Bost, R-Ill., Chairman Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Ranking Member Jerry Moran, R-Kan., introduced the Senator Elizabeth Dole 21st Century Veterans Healthcare and Benefits Improvement Act on Tuesday, pulling together several existing EHRM-related bills into one legislative package.
“Since I became Chairman, I have long said that the men and women who have served and sacrificed for our nation have earned a VA that works with them – not against them,” Rep. Bost said in a press release. “Over the past year and a half, we have listened to veterans and stakeholders to find the gaps within VA’s services and consider commonsense legislation to improve them where we can. The bipartisan bill from my friend from Arizona, the Senator Elizabeth Dole 21st Century Veterans Healthcare and Benefits Improvement Act, is a product of that work.”
“By improving veterans’ access to the care they need, bolstering long-term care options and assistance for homeless veterans, strengthening life-saving mental health services, and increasing transparency and oversight of VA’s new Electronic Health Record program, this package is a common sense step towards delivering veterans and their families the kind of support they earned and deserve,” added Sen. Tester.
While the bill has several aims, it includes an entire section on improving the EHRM program. The EHRM program is currently in the middle of a reset period, putting all future deployments on pause while the VA and Oracle Cerner make technical improvements to the system.
Specifically, the bill would restrict “preliminary program activities” at additional VA sites until the department submits data demonstrating that all facilities currently using the Oracle Cerner EHR system “have recovered to normal operational levels,” according to a bill summary.
It would also prevent any deployments of the EHR system at other facilities until the VA certifies that “the director of such facility has confidence that the system is fully and accurately built and configured, the facility’s staff and infrastructure are prepared to receive the system, any adverse effects can be mitigated, and the system has met an uptime requirement.”
The bill also gives the VA 90 days to establish healthcare quality metrics for evaluating the EHR system, taking into account the differences at each VA site.
Perhaps most notable, the bill would also require the VA to put an end to its EHRM program two years after its enactment, unless the VA has certified that the six existing sites using the Oracle Cerner EHR “have recovered and that the health care quality metrics demonstrate improvement in each measurement period since the system became active at each facility.”
The VA said its most recent EHRM deployment at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center (Lovell FHCC) near Chicago has been “very positive” thus far but is not without its challenges – especially in the wake of the Change Healthcare ransomware attack.
Nevertheless, VA Secretary Denis McDonough told lawmakers last month that VA is “pleased with progress” at Lovell, and the agency plans to have serious discussions before the end of this fiscal year “about going live more broadly.”
“We have to get it right before leaving the current posture of reset. We are committed to this record. We’re not going to stay in reset forever,” McDonough said.
McDonough said the VA does not plan on being in reset mode for the entirety of fiscal year 2025.
