The Division of Veterans Affairs’ new digital smartly being document draw has experienced extra than 50 latency points or outages since its initial crawl-are living.
VA spokespeople suggested The Spokesman-Overview’s Orion Donovan-Smith that the draw had experienced 42 “unplanned degradations” and eight “unplanned outages” sooner than April 20, 2022 – with two extra taking region the next week.
VA representatives suggested Healthcare IT News that the draw was once no longer down all the plot in which thru the full incidents.
“Right here just isn’t any longer factual and mischaracterizes the inform,” they mentioned. “The overwhelming majority of the 50 incidents private been no longer outages. Moderately, they’ll most attention-grabbing be described as latency points, or the slowing of the draw, but the EHR was once serene functional.
“Staunch thru the outages, when the EHR is unable to be dilapidated by scientific personnel, patient-care areas reverted to downtime procedures, that are standard industry-huge protocols when EHR outages happen,” they added. “Downtime procedures focal level on reducing disruption to patient care, whereas relying totally on paper processes for documentation.
“In the past, we’re no longer mindful that the draw outages disrupted patient care,” mentioned the representatives.
Cerner deferred requests for comment to VA.
WHY IT MATTERS
After lots of delays, VA launched its Cerner EHR at Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center in Spokane, Washington, in October 2020.
Since then, the initiative has faced hiccups, including complaints from users, distress from legislators and a 90-day evaluate