Electronic Health Record Modernization System (EHRM)
Dept. of Veterans Affairs, Office of Enterprise Health Record Modernization
The Problem
The VA has implemented this system across multiple clinics already; however, to ensure that this system remains compliant, operational, and adaptive, E5 was asked to conduct testing and planning to ensure the system remains effective for years to come.
The Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) electronic health record (EHR) system is responsible for storing and maintaining veteran health data. This legacy system proved cumbersome for veterans, as it often required them to manage many printed documents and to repeatedly provide basic health information to different providers. Because veterans often have multiple providers and sources of care, they found the overall health data transfer to be inefficient and stressful.
The Solution
To address the VA’s data protection challenge, Elements 5 first created an interagency change configuration management system to prevent disruptions and ensure consistency. We then assembled a team of system owners, firewall engineers, and cybersecurity personnel to act as a tracker and facilitator for network ports and CCB ticketing. These actions ensured data transfer and connectivity and streamline the review and approval system for changes made to the EHR system.
The Impact
The EHR has been implemented in 6 VA medical centers, 25 VA clinics, and 104 remote VA sites. This new system is currently serving 13,000 end users and 168,000 of our nation’s veterans. Elements 5 will continue to work with the VA to perform more testing and functionality analysis before developing plans to roll out to more centers across the nation.
The final step was to develop and manage Authority to Operate and Authority to Connect (ATO/ATC) packages to ensure that documentation exists to certify legacy systems to operate in parallel with the new EHR system. Alongside this, a review and insights feedback loop were created to continuously update this system.