The Department of Veterans Affairs reported significant improvements after standardizing most of its high-priority datasets, FedScoop reported Feb. 10.
Laura Prietula, the VA's acting deputy chief information officer, said the department had to improve its processes to transfer data uniformly to the Cerner Millennium and HealtheIntent platforms.
Some of the improvements include, data entry practices to ensure inputs aren’t skipped when the information isn’t immediately available and cleaning and curating data through its Vx130 platform, which migrates data from VA's legacy system to Cerner's platforms to identify problems and strengths physicians experience with the migrated data.
"There are some categories that we’re working more directly with our VHA functional community on," Ms. Prietula said. "We are in this journey together in making sure that the standardization is appropriate, and that [data] is securely transferred, to ensure that we can provide the clinical decision support insights that the clinical community truly needs from us."
In an audit conducted August 2019 to February 2022 by the GAO, department physicians detailed the challenges they faced trying to access patient data due to the department failing to monitor data accessibility, accuracy and appropriateness during its migration from the VA national data center to Cerner's data center.
Physicians reported being unable to access such patient information as allergies, medications and immunizations. Physicians interviewed in the audit also stated that data errors were present.
The GAO stated in the audit that the department did not set goals and performance measures for migrated data, causing the challenges.
"We’ve learned a lot around the lack of standardization," Ms. Prietula said. "And it may not just be because of the data models themselves but also some processes that we need to change or policies."