Hard agree, and not just because I'm a spreadsheet nerd. Why are we all here? Isn't it in the service…
Morning Headlines 10/30/15
Lawmaker Hits DoD Over Failure to Merge Defense, VA Records Systems
The Government Reform and Oversight Committee met alongside the House Veterans Affairs Committee to hear the testimony from DHMSM and GAO representatives on why the VA and DoD has failed to integrate its EHR systems, despite having spent billions in taxpayer dollars.
McKesson Raises Outlook, Unveils Buyback, Profit Rises 32%
McKesson repots Q2 results: revenue up 10 percent to $49 billion, adjusted EPS $3.31 vs. $2.79, beating analyst expectations on both. McKesson also announces that its board has approved a $2 billion stock buy back plan.
ICD-10 Transition Moves Forward
CMS reports that the total claims submitted and total claims rejected since the ICD-10 transition are trending in line with historical ICD-9 averages.
Theranos, Facing Criticism, Says It Has Changed Board Structure
Theranos announces a restructuring of its board of directors, reducing it from 12 to just five members and establishing a supplementary board of counselors and another board that will give medical advice.
Rep. Duckworth is naïve to think that digitizing the VA and DOD under the same EHR is simple. And there are many other matters of neglect that put the veterans at risk that far exceed the significance the deficiencies in electronic medical records which will not be solved by throwing $ billions into the cash registers of the EHR vendors.
I find it particularly egregious that just 2 different departments of the same government, with the exact same patients, cannot interoperate their systems for less than billions of dollars. That is ridiculous. If we extrapolated that amount to interoperate the health systems in the US then we are talking about needing trillions of dollars as the VA and DOD take care of only a small percentage of the US population. So when ONC and CMS starts whining about seeing results from a 30 billion dollar EHR investment…they should be thrilled they got any results. I predict that they will see very little in the next few years of a rather straightforward VA DOD project with a 14 billion dollar investment. As anyone can look up, any US government project with payments over a billion dollars usually fails and fails miserably, rife with corruption and missed deadlines and lack of success. So I would certainly bet against any success of this VA DOD project.