The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs plans to hire 1,000 IT workers to help with the implementation of its Oracle Cerner EHR, FedScoop reported.
VA CIO Kurt DelBene told reporters Dec. 9 his Office of Information and Technology would aim to attract the new tech staffers via a special salary rate and the possibility of remote work. The agency's EHR rollout has been beset with problems such as outages and scheduling difficulties.
"The EHR has been … a challenging project. We are already the largest Oracle Cerner customer in their EHR system. It is also a very complex environment with our medical centers and clinics across the U.S., and we are stressing Cerner in ways they had not been stressed before," Mr. DelBene said, according to the Dec. 9 story.
"I think [the new hires] will be able to focus our efforts in very clear ways, which is what product managers do great at, which is here's all the issues, here's the underlying problems around those issues — now let's get to a plan of attack that actually gets us the fastest possible improvement there."
Mr. DelBene also said the VA has been reaching out to laid-off workers from Big Tech companies such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft to help fill the roles, according to Federal News Network.