House Veterans' Affairs Committee Chair Mike Bost, R-Ill., said Congress must provide increased oversight of the VA's Oracle Cerner EHR rollout, or the program will be terminated, NextGov reported March 27.
Mr. Bost placed much of the blame for the troubled VA EHR modernization program on Oracle Cerner stating, "it's Cerner and Oracle that need to get their act together."
"VA simply has to make sure that, at the place where they're going to roll it out, the standards are met," Mr. Bost told the publication. "And the most important standard is that the operator and manager and overseer of the particular VA [medical facility] where it is going to roll out is comfortable moving forward with changing a system."
In 2018, Oracle Cerner received a $10 billion contract to modernize the VA's EHR system from its legacy system, VistA, to a Cerner system.
The implementation project, which has been ongoing since 2020, has been plagued with outages and delays. Most recently, one in which the VA found that the EHR system caused six incidents of "catastrophic harm" to veterans, and four of those incidents led to the death of patients.
Mr. Bost, along with 10 Republican co-sponsors, have introduced legislation that aims to prevent the VA from future rollouts of the Oracle Cerner EHR system at additional VA medical facilities until it has met certain performance and facility readiness standards.
Prior to the Oracle Cerner EHR system, the VA spent $1.7 billion dollars on other "failed predecessor electronic healthcare record systems."
Oracle Cerner did not respond to Becker's request for comment.