While a Senate panel was receiving advice Wednesday on how to improve EHR usability in the private sector, two House subcommittees were told of serious problems that still plague government IT projects, healthcare and otherwise.
David A. Powner, director of IT management issues for the Government Accountability Office, delivered a scathing report on “actions and oversight urgently needed to reduce waste and improve performance in acquisitions and operations” of the federal government’s IT infrastructure. The report, presented Wednesday to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform‘s subcommittees on government operations and information technology, covered numerous areas of Washington’s $80 billion annual IT spending, but healthcare figured prominently.
Of particular concern to Powner were interoperability of health records between the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs, the bumpy rollout of the HealthCare.gov insurance marketplace and the VA’s difficulty in building an online appointment scheduling system.
Typical of the tone was this passage on DoD-VA interoperability:
DoD’s and VA’s initiatives to modernize their electronic health records systems are intended to address sharing data among the departments’ health information systems, but achieving this has been a challenge for these agencies over the last 15 years. In February 2013, the two departments’ Secretaries announced that instead of developing a new common, integrated electronic health record system, the departments would focus on achieving interoperability between separate DOD and VA systems. The departments’ change and history of challenges in improving their health information systems heighten concern about whether they will be successful.
“These and other failed IT projects often suffered from a lack of disciplined and effective management, such as project planning, requirements definition, and program oversight and governance. In many instances, agencies have not consistently applied best practices that are critical to successfully acquiring IT investments,” the report stated.
In all, Powner said that the GAO made 737 IT-related recommendations to the executive branch between October 2009 and December 2014. As of January 2015, just 23 percent of those recommendations had been fully implemented, he reported.
