WASHINGTON – Spokane’s VA Hospital and other medical facilities across the country suffered a major slowdown on Monday and part of Tuesday after updates to a problematic electronic health record system caused “poor performance,” they said. the military personnel department said on Tuesday.
An employee at Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center reported this issue to The Spokesman-Review. VA spokesperson Terrence Hayes confirmed that changes made to systems by the Department of Defense, which shares a database with the VA, “had the unintended consequence of disrupting the services that provide connectivity to the network.” .
As a result, Hayes said in a statement, each time a user clicked a button on the system, they had to wait for a “long interval” for the next screen to appear. This has reduced the number of patients the Spokane hospital can handle, further slowing down a clumsily designed system that has left employees exhausted.
Hayes has confirmed that all medical facilities using the system are affected by the slowdown. This includes more than half of his providers in all military medical systems and his VA clinics and hospitals in Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Ohio. As of Tuesday afternoon, “configuration changes” had been made to resolve the issue, he said, and VA “will continue to monitor systems and user feedback to ensure the delay has been corrected.” Added.
In an internal chat, a Mann-Grandstaff employee expressed frustration at the slowdown, saying Monday that patients will be cared for and treated in a system that medical workers rely on to coordinate work and reduce the risk of error. I had to work extra hours to document the .
Since October 2020, Spokane Hospital and its affiliated clinics in the interior northwest have been a proving ground for efforts to replace the VA’s electronic medical records system with a new system. It was developed by Cerner, a division of tech giant Oracle, under his $10 billion contract signed by the Trump administration in 2018.
Hayes said in an email that the VA is working with Oracle and the Department of Defense to resolve the issue. He emphasized that the system was not “down” despite the slow speed.
According to data released by FedScoop in August, between September 8, 2020 and June 10, 2022, nearly 500 incidents resulted in partial or complete system outages.
In a statement, Michael Egbert, Oracle’s vice president of corporate communications, said the company was aware of the slowdown, but added that the problem “has nothing to do with the Oracle-operated portion of the system.”
In a report presented to VA leaders in November and obtained by The Spokesman-Review, healthcare technology research firm KLAS Research found that 280 organizations it surveyed had VA’s Oracle Cerner system outperform any other electronic medical records system. found to be of lower rank than While only 4% of users said the new VA system “enables quality care,” 69% said the same about VA’s existing system, known as VistA.
In response to issues at Mann-Grandstaff and other test sites, VA leaders delayed deployment of the Oracle Cerner system in other clinics and hospitals, including western Washington and Boise. The system’s next launch is scheduled for July 22nd in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The facility there is a larger and more complex hospital than the one in which the system is deployed. Including Spokane. Walla Walla; White City and Roseburg, Oregon; and Columbus, Ohio.
