Check your mail.
Department of Veterans Affairs Undersecretary for Health Dr. Shereef Elnahal on Wednesday said that letters are being sent out to 41,000 veterans who may have been impacted by the rollout of the new Oracle-Cerner electronic health records system at five VA facilities nationwide.
“We are doing this out of an abundance of caution, this broad disclosure, to make sure that if a veteran identifies that they haven’t heard about a medication, or a laboratory study, or a radiology study that they know they need, they call us so that we can get to the bottom of that, even before we fix the system issues,” Elnahal said during a media roundtable.
The Oracle Cerner Millennium EHR initially went live at Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center in Spokane, Washington in Nov. 2020. It is meant to replace VA’s legacy VistA system and to create a health record that could follow veterans from their time in the military to civilian life.
However, three reports from the VA’s Office of Inspector General found issues with patient safety as a result of the EHR rollout. A July report concluded that at least 149 Mann-Grandstaff patients were impacted by a computer glitch that caused the information to be put into an “unknown queue” that medical providers did not know about.
In addition to Mann-Grandsraff, the system has also gone online at VA facilities in Walla Walla, Washington; Columbus, Ohio; and Roseburg and White City, Oregon.
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Elnahal stressed that not everyone who receives a letter had their health care delayed. Instead, they may not have received follow-up information about prescriptions, lab work, or future appointments.
He said the letter asks veterans to “check their appointments, check their medications, check to make sure they have that next step in their care scheduled and confirmed, and reach out to us if they haven't heard from us about that next step," he said.
Elnahal said those receiving care at the five facilities need a resolution to the configuration issues that led to the letters being sent.
“We’ve determined that the fastest way to address those risks is to work on the system, and reconfigure it and fix those issues where that system exists,” he said. “I believe that, by extension, if we do that, this will be a system that will be ready to deploy elsewhere.”
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Elnahal said the Oracle-Cerner EHR is being used by the Department of Defense, Coast Guard, and private health care providers.
Over the next six to eight months, patient safety teams will perform root-cause analysis for any outcomes or deaths that were unexpected at VA medical centers and whether EHR concerns led to that, Elnahal said.
“I think that the system can ultimately work, but we need to make it work, and that’s what is happening in these next six to eight months,” he said.
The VA recently announced that it will delay further rollouts of the EHR until June 2023.
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com.