Evergreen Reporter

Washington D.C. – On May 16, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the VA Subcommittee, and a senior member of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, released the following statement on VA’s announcement of its renegotiated EHR contract with Oracle Cerner:

“It’s important to see that this renegotiated contract increases VA’s ability to hold Oracle Cerner accountable on key performance markers and hard metrics—something the contract negotiated under the Trump Administration severely lacked.

“Under the new contract, Oracle Cerner will be penalized for failing to meet expectations on system reliability, responsiveness, and interoperability with other health care systems and applications. And importantly, instead of another 5-year term, the renegotiated contract is for 5 one-year terms—providing VA with more frequent opportunities to review progress and renegotiate.

“All in all, this is a much stronger contract, and I’m hopeful it will help VA ensure that Oracle Cerner gets this EHR program to work for Washington state providers and veterans. Our veterans deserve the very best health care we can offer, and our VA providers deserve a system that works—I will continue using every tool at my disposal to push VA and Oracle Cerner to get this right.”

Senator Murray has been conducting oversight on the flawed EHR rollout in Washington state since the Trump Administration first negotiated the contract with Oracle (later acquired by Cerner), and at every point in the process since then. Murray has consistently pushed VA on its failed implementation of EHR—conducting oversight, holding the administration accountable, and calling on VA to halt deployment of EHR until they get it right in Washington state. In her role as Chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, VA, and Related Agencies, Murray met recently with Oracle Cerner to discuss the issues VA providers face when using the EHR system and to get to the bottom of what can be done to fix the system.

In March of 2022, Senator Murray demanded a pause of the Cerner Electronic Health Record system rollout in Washington state, citing patient safety risks, and demanding the concerns laid out in reports from the VA Office of Inspector General – and previous reports over the last two years – be resolved before the EHR program is deployed at any other sites in Washington state. In October 2022, following Senator Murray’s push, VA announced it would delay the rollout of the Oracle Cerner EHR system at VA Puget Sound Health Care System until after June 2023. Since then — in April 2023 — VA announced that future deployments of EHR would be halted in order to prioritize improvements at the five sites that currently use EHR, including Mann-Grandstaff in Spokane and Jonathan M. Wainwright in Walla Walla.

In the omnibus appropriations bill that passed in December of 2022, Senator Murray secured critical language to ensure accountability and transparency from VA in its implementation of the Electronic Health Records Modernization. In March 2023, Murray helped introduce comprehensive legislation that would require VA to implement a series of EHR reforms to better serve veterans, medical personnel, and taxpayers. The bill would restructure, enhance, and strengthen the entire EHR program while also mandating aggressive reporting to Congress to increase oversight, accountability, and transparency.

Original source can be found here.