Department of Veterans Affairs news from FierceHealthIT

Last week, the Senate approved a budget amendment that would create a reserve fund for health IT legislation. Without getting too deep into procedural stuff, the net effect of the amendment will be Read more...

Federal spending on HIT is set for a boom over the next five years, according to a new report from a market research firm. The firm, Input, projects that federal HIT spending will rise 7.1 percent Read more...

When it comes to IT integration projects, this one's clearly a mega-monster. But at long last, it looks like the Department of Defense (DoD) and the VA have finally achieved some interoperability Read more...

WorldVistA, the nonprofit that is leading CMS efforts to create an ambulatory version of the VA's VistA system, has gotten a fair amount of attention to date. Some of this buzz is because it's the Read more...

While commercial EMR vendors say they could develop a joint Web-based health record system within a year for the VA and DoD, it increasingly seems bureaucracy makes that all but impossible. WebMD, Read more...

It looks like a recent data breach suffered by the Department of Veterans Affairs could be very pricey. Officials continue to deal with the recent loss of a hard drive, which disappeared from a VA medical center in Birmingham, AL in January of this year. The disk contained confidential data on any U.S. doctor billed Medicaid or Medicare through 2004, as well as more than 500,000 VA patients. To …

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Given how often the Department of Veterans Affairs plays the role of healthcare IT vanguard, it should come as no surprise that the department will be among the first to combine electronic health records (EHRs) with genetic data. As the VA has had an EHR system in place for years now, the department is the ideal candidate for testing this kind of advanced functionality. On a voluntary basis, veterans can have their genetic information added to their health record, where it will be linked …

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The jury is still out on just how serious a problem online ID theft is, but the picture is getting a bit more clear--and scary--when it comes to your company's liability if it does allow sensitive patient info to be stolen. An interesting piece by attorney and former federal prosecutor Howard Goldstein in the equally scary sounding Business …

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Uh-oh. What had looked like a full speed ahead innovative program just hit a speed bump. The Defense Department opposes congressional guidance to adopt the Department of Veterans Affairs' electronic health records (EHR) architecture or to use identical software platforms, data standards and data repositories, Dr. Stephen Jones, principal deputy assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs, wrote in a letter to Federal Computer Week. Jones' comments were contained in a letter …

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Congress is about to ask the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs to use one electronic health records (EHRs) system. DOD and the VA treat a similar pool of patients, so a common military EHR would be useful and logical, industry and healthcare experts say. The House and Senate adopted similar language in appropriations bills in which they urge the VA and DOD to use a common EHR system. Differences in the bills must be resolved in conference later this year.

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