While the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has faced considerable health IT challenges in the past few years, the VA is attempting to increase its interoperability and enhance its health information exchange and new EHR system.
Recent reports from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) have put a spotlight on significant issues surrounding VA’s health information exchanges and its new Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) program.
The OIG HIE report found training challenges, the need for increased community partners, the use of community coordinators, and technology issues that need to be addressed to enhance the VA’s ability to effectively utilize its HIEs and the ability to exchange patient data.
These reports and a basic need for increased interoperability have triggered a series of VA health IT advancements and optimizations over the past few months.
Most recently, the organization has developed a joint HIE in partnership with the Department of Defense (DoD) and a Veterans Data Integration and Federation Enterprise Platform to promote interoperability. The VA has also looked into robotic process automation to help transfer its paper records over to its new EHR system.
PROMOTING AND INCREASING INTEROPERABILITY
Patient data exchange and interoperability is crucial for the VA to enhance patient care. Developing an interoperable patient record that allows the patient to seek care and bring his EHR to providers outside of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) system has long been the goal of the 2018 MISSION Act.
To achieve this goal, VA launched the Veterans Data Integration and Federation Enterprise Platform (VDIF EP), which made veteran patient records available to not only the VHA but also outside providers.
Partnering with InterSystems HealthShare, the interoperability platform created a longitudinal patient record by making veteran patient data interoperable across both VA and external EHR systems.
“InterSystems is proud to build on its 40-year partnership with VA to improve the delivery of care for Veterans and their families,” George Hou, head of solutions for the Department of Veterans Affairs at InterSystems, said at the time.
“During this unprecedented healthcare crisis, providers are actively relying on clean, accurate, and complete healthcare data to deliver care to veterans.”
With this platform in place, providers can now access a veteran’s full medical history in a single workflow, rather than retrieving the patient’s medical history on external platforms. This streamlined process lifts patient care and decreases clinician burden.
VDIF EP is currently connected to 130 separate EHR systems that support 172 VA medical centers and over 1,000 outpatient clinics. The agency said its primary goal is to provide veterans with a beneficial and seamless medical experience. This platform allows VA to potentially reach this goal.
DEVELOPING A JOINT HEALTH INFORMATION EXCHANGE
While VA is increasing its interoperability and patient data exchange, the agency is also driving interoperability between itself, the DoD, and community healthcare partners.
Until April 2020, VA and its military partner, DoD, were unable to create a seamless, secure exchange of patient data between the two departments and VA’s community providers. But with the newly developed joint HIE, clinicians are now able to make timely and informed medical decisions, which lead to better health outcomes for veterans and service members.
The technology takes the data sharing burden off veterans because providers can easily access health data for both DoD and VA members.
“When clinicians have a more comprehensive picture of their patient’s health data, including data from private sector providers, this improves the quality of health care,” Neil Evans, the interim director of the Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization (FEHRM) program office, said in a May statement.
“The health information being exchanged should enable patient-provider conversations to start more productively and lead to a better experience for Veterans.”
Stemming from the success of VA’s HIE, VHIE, the mutual exchange has the potential to expand the community exchange partnerships for both the VA and DoD, primarily with CommonWell, which would connect the network to 15,000 additional provider sites.
At the time of the announcement, the VA and DoD joint HIE connected the two agencies to more than 2,000 hospitals, 8,000 pharmacies, 33,000 health clinics, 1,100 laboratories, 800 health centers, and 300 nursing homes.
INTEGRATING ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION
In an effort to further meet the MISSION Act demands, VA has looked into using a robotic process automation (RPA) tool to digitize all patient health records amid its EHRM launch.
Per VA inspector general, VA has a 600,000 document backlog that, if stacked, would reach five miles in height.
As a result of this tremendous paper document backlog, VA is aiming to digitize these documents with an RPA tool to integrate the patient records into its current VistA EHR system and eventually, its new EHRM system. VA said this automated process aims to eradicate backlog, decrease administrative burden and the number of manual tasks, and increase quality and traceability using both EHR platforms.
“VA is seeking information in regard to the best solution; therefore, request the vendor propose solutions that they feel best fit; either a full, partial or no managed solution,” VA explained in July.
“If vendor is considering a fully managed solution, they will be responsible for providing VA a solution consisting of a suite of tools including software licensing and maintenance of the suite including all software updates, original equipment manufacturer (or authorized resellers) provided professional services, and potential items for consideration for scalability throughout VA.”
VA said the RPA tool should be scalable to satisfy new and increased workloads, and the agency outlined three goals for the RPA tool. It wants to automate the scanning process, identify false documents and flag them for human intervention, and provide feedback to fix problems for future planning.
While the VA has faced harsh criticism by OIG and the public for its current HIE, patient data exchange, and EHR systems, the agency is attempting to enhance its existing platforms and develop new platforms to adhere to this criticism.
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Photo courtesy of: EHR Intelligence
Originally Published On: EHR Intelligence
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This Post Has One Comment
Hopefully this will be accomplished with the focus of patient services, and not economic gain.
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