New VA electronic record-keeping plan alarms experts

Sierra Vista Herald ^ | Tom Philpott

[rlmorel]

"...My experience is that the medical records system is good, but not all the people using it are..."

Bears repeating.

And this is not necessarily a knock on the VA...it is a knock on the government, which is far larger and has a lot of connections to various things...including the VA.

I have known many people who work at the VA, and there are a lot of good people.

[rlmorel]

"...They were running WindowsXP long after they stopped offering updates..."

That is not an uncommon experience, particularly with the medical field.

There are a lot of cash strapped hospitals, and given the choice between upgrading an Xray machine or an operating room, and upgrading all the computers and the enterprise wide OS, the OS gets shoved to the back burner.

To make it worse, vendors who sell software often are not keeping their versions compatibility up to the latest OS, and I have seen plenty of situations where the move to a new OS cannot be done because some important application still isn't validated with the newest ones. Some important application won't support the move, and you have to shell out an additional $250K to a million to get some new app that does, plus all the interconnectivity...it is a huge burden.

Health Care can be a strange place for IT, that is for sure.

[Wuli]

I had VA staff I interacted with that had various lengths of VA experience; some long time and some recent.

It took forever for all of them to get to the information or point in the system with the right information we/they were looking for. I’d get my records printed out periodically and instead of it having any organization it was a gross records dump you had to wade through forever to make sense of.

[tired&retired]

My wife is a VA Dr. She’s been working for them 30 years and with the current medical records system since 1998 when it began. We even have security access from our home for when she is “On Call” covering the ER.

She is counting down the months to her retirement in 2019. She can’t wait.