Enterprise Testing Service Support Services (ETSSS)
Dept. of Veterans Affairs, Office of Enterprise Health Record Modernization
The Problem
The VA has developed and implemented a new EHR management system across multiple clinics already; however, to ensure that this system remains compliant, operational, and adaptive, Elements 5 (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 help the VA implement the new EHR management system, we created a new interoperability and deployment testing process that focused extensively on developing test plans, test cases, and test scripts for each legacy system and reporting results in a centralized location.
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. E5 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.
This allowed information to be easily compared and transferred to legacy system operators when it came time for implementation. We also performed extensive capacity planning analysis, Independent Validation and Verification (IV&V), validation testing, and performance testing to ensure the new EHR could withstand high levels of data transfer between legacy systems.