This popped up a few days ago:
‘We took a broken system and just broke it completely’
Trump touted a project to make veterans’ health care seamless, but some doctors say it’s a disaster.
By ARTHUR ALLEN
03/08/2018 05:05 AM EST
President Donald Trump last year hailed a multibillion-dollar initiative to create a seamless digital health system for active duty military and the VA that he said would deliver “faster, better, and far better quality care.”
But the military’s $4.3 billion Cerner medical record system has utterly failed to achieve those goals at the first hospitals that went online. Instead, technical glitches and poor training have caused dangerous errors and reduced the number of patients who can be treated, according to interviews with more than 25 military and Veterans Affairs health IT specialists and doctors, including six who work at the four Pacific Northwest military medical facilities that rolled out the software over the past year.
Four physicians at Naval Station Bremerton, in the Puget Sound, one of the first hospitals to go online, described an atmosphere so stressful that some clinicians quit because they were terrified they would hurt patients, or even kill them. Prescription requests came out wrong at the pharmacy. Physician referrals failed to go through to specialists. Physicians were unsure how to do basic things such as request lab reports.
Doctors complained it could take 10 minutes to get into the system, which then frequently kicked them out. The military’s ponderous cybersecurity system was largely to blame, but doctors were frustrated contractors hadn’t figured out a way to work around the problems, as they had with the previous electronic record system.
“We took a broken system and just broke it completely,” said one doctor, who like most of those interviewed requested anonymity because they lacked military authorization to speak about the project.
Patient Safety Reports — required whenever a life- or limb-threatening medical error is discovered — were “being filed almost every day” in the first few months, said another physician at Bremerton. One report dealt with a patient admitted with a critical heart ailment who later died after getting the wrong treatment, partly because of tests that were sent to another military hospital and lost. The role of Cerner’s software in the death is unclear since it is often difficult to pinpoint the specific cause of errors in complex medical systems.
These and other problems, particularly concerns about the VA's ability to share records with civilian health systems, contributed to VA Secretary David Shulkin’s decision in December to delay signing a $10 billion contract to install Cerner at the VA, which would be the largest electronic health record job in history. When done, the project would cover 19 million people in the military and VA systems.
Despite the startup issues, which have been glossed over in public discussion of the project, the White House continues to make the overhaul of the military and VA medical records a centerpiece of its government reform efforts.
"This was a huge win for our service," Jared Kushner told a health IT conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, referring to Shulkin's decision last spring to use Cerner following consultations with Kushner's office. "The president wants to make interoperable health records available for all Americans."
But Kushner’s comments gave the impression the military had already created an electronic record system, and was just waiting for the VA to connect to it. In fact, the military’s MHS Genesis project, which started rolling out in February 2017, is still in the early stages, with completion scheduled for 2022.
And the tough experiences described by doctors and others suggest a thorny path ahead.
Bob Marshall, a health IT specialist at Madigan Army Medical Center, another early rollout site, blamed the poor start partly on the Pentagon acquisition office’s inexperience with civilian record systems and the lack of a “sandbox” where clinicians could perfect the system before it was turned on.
A digital health system must be configured properly before it goes live, said Marshall, who has broad experience in civilian and military IT work. That did not happen in this rollout, he said.
“The bottom line is … the Cerner user build is immature and needs to be brought up to a functional level,” he said. “There were some expectations at higher levels that this … was an out-of-the-box solution that would work perfectly, but it didn’t.”
Officials from Cerner and Leidos, the lead contractor on the project, acknowledge startup difficulties but said they’re temporary. They said they are making fixes and physicians will get used to other changes. They note that Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane, Washington, which has a small clinic that went live with the system in February 2017, recently received an industry rating indicating it is making good use of it.
While neither company would comment on safety incidents, Cerner General Manager Travis Dalton said the system overall was making medicine safer.
In the first year, he said, the new computer system issued thousands of meaningful alerts that helped clinicians avoid bad decisions, including a suicide risk alert that has been added to about 100 patient charts.
Vastly more here:
This is just a huge project, with a price and risks to match, covering the population of a medium sized country.
The test here is not that there are teething problems, but how effectively they are addressed and if the patience of the users is not totally lost a the configuration is perfected.
I certainly don’t envy Cerner and their contractors in this endeavor! Who ever imagined ‘healthcare could be so complicated!’
David.
1 comment:
Another huge project, The Struggle to Build a Massive ‘Biobank’ of Patient Data.
Americans tend to have medical records stored slapdash all over the place, and they change insurers and medical plans frequently. There is little uniformity in the country’s electronic health systems.
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