Department of Veterans Affairs CIO Kurt DelBene pushed back against calls for the agency to diversify its IT vendors, saying that breaking larger contracts into smaller ones wouldn't ensure "consistency," Nextgov reported June 8.
In 2021, half of the VA's IT-related contracts were given to just 10 vendors, according to the Government Accountability Office. Mr. DelBene's comments come as the agency receives pushback from the troubled Cerner EHR rollout.
Mr. DelBene did point to the VA's Pathfinder program, an acquisition website designed to find outside organizations, as measures that the VA has taken to include smaller vendors.
"If you look at some of the failures — healthcare.gov, for instance — that team chose to take the five major components of healthcare.gov and give them to different contractors," Mr. DelBene said. "And you can see where the integration did not work, when they flip the switch and turn the thing on. So then you still have to have the thing built in such a way that there's consistency across the key places."