Hidden Costs and Flawed Training Plague the V.A.'s Huge Software Upgrade

[Eugene]

Source: New York Times

Hidden Costs and Flawed Training Plague the V.A.’s Huge Software Upgrade

A $16 billion effort to modernize health records at the Department of Veterans Affairs ran into major problems in its first installation, two watchdog reports say.

By Dave Philipps
July 9, 2021, 4:40 p.m. ET

The Department of Veterans Affairs is in the process of overhauling the country’s oldest electronic health record system at the country’s largest hospital network. Even if it goes smoothly, planners have repeatedly warned, it will be an extremely complicated task that will take 10 years and cost more than $16 billion.

And so far, it is going anything but smoothly.

The new health record software is supposed to increase efficiency and speed up care in the beleaguered veterans’ health system, which serves more than nine million veterans. But when the department put it into use for the first time in October at a V.A. medical center in Washington State, it did the opposite.

The department’s inspector general issued two scathing reports on the rollout this week. One found that the company that was awarded a no-bid contract by the Trump administration to do the overhaul underestimated costs by billions. The other report said the training program for hospital staff that the company created was so flawed and confusing that many employees considered it “an utter waste of time.”

All the employees who went through the training at the first hospital to use the new health record system, the Mann-Grandstaff V.A. Medical Center in Spokane, Wash., were given a test afterward to see whether they had learned to use it proficiently. Nearly two-thirds failed, the report said.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/va-health-software-problems.html

[abqtommy]

1. I have followed with interest the problems that Canada has experience when their new

governmental pay system was put online some years back.

"As federal Phoenix payroll fiasco hits 2-year mark, families continue to bear brunt of it.

Problem-plagued, IBM-customized pay system remains 'embarrassing,' apologetic minister admits."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/families-suffer-phoenix-pay-government-minister-embarrased-1.4543130

Closer to home for me within the last two months my credit union changed over to a new system and
there were immediate problems. I raised holy hell and threatened to go to another institution. They
did get things fixed up fairly quickly.

The lesson is: anticipate problems and have resources dedicated to fixing/patching things up

[Warpy]

2. I'm sure they desperately need one

Because one of their systems was the only system I ever hacked into in my life. Questions were asked and I quickly fessed up and told them why floor nurses needed to get up to date information on labs and tests rather than waiting 36 hours for hard copies to be posted in the charts. I was persuasive. My punishment was teaching the other nurses how to use the system after they'd been given passwords.

I got into that system within about 10 minutes. It was a joke. While I'm sure they've upgraded it several times since then, I'm also sure they're still way behind the curve, GOP administrations always underfund them.

But yeah, any serious system upgrade is going to be buggy as hell. I don't even like Windows upgrades, they always make me feel like somebody moved my food dish, and I see Win 11 is now out.

Sigh.