Giving a patient medications in the ER, having them pop positive on a test, and then withholding further medications because…
Morning Headlines 8/8/22
CVS Plans to Bid for Signify Health
CVS Health will reportedly make a bid to acquire value-based home care provider Signify Health, which has been exploring strategic alternatives.
Definitive Healthcare Reports Financial Results for Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2022
Healthcare commercial intelligence vendor Definitive Healthcare reports Q2 results: revenue up 37%, EPS –$0.05, beating expectations for both.
Health information management vendor ScanSTAT acquires release-of-information company Resolve ROI for an undisclosed amount.
VA Cerner EHR system goes down for over 4 hours due to patient database corruption issue
The VA’s Cerner system goes down for several hours due to database corruption.
How Cerner fumbles VA and rolls out at DHA without issue, and Congress to my knowledge doesn’t as why, so strange. Have I just missed anyone looking deeper?
Looks like the House rep for Spokane and one of the Senators from Washington State are engaged:
https://mcmorris.house.gov/posts/mcmorris-rodgers-blasts-va-cerner-for-patient-harm-at-spokane-va
https://www.murray.senate.gov/murray-mcmorris-rodgers-secure-va-commitment-to-hold-town-halls-for-veterans-in-eastern-washington/
That said, when has anyone in Corporate America actually been held accountable for anything in this country lately? The most likely outcome of this is we go through some kind of Committee Hearing song and dance to just keep throwing money at the problem. Cerner is locked in on this and I don’t see the feds inevitably going back to Epic until around 2030. You know what they say – Epic is the first choice the second time around.
VA is a much more complicated rollout since there are so many different interactions and configurations of VistA. In addition, the management of the config and deployment are different teams with differing standards and methodologies.
I literally cannot imagine any circumstances where the replacement of VistA was not troublesome. VistA was custom designed for the VA and was their first EMR/EHR, AFAIK. Therefore VistA became the very definition of a “correct” EMR for the VA.
It is likely that even VistA’s shortcomings and oddities are normal and expected for thousands of VA staff.
That said, I do wonder about the incident reporting database corruption. I’ve worked with DB/2 and SQL Server for over 30 years. Not once have encountered true db corruption with these systems. Logical table relation problems, sometimes yes, but corruption? No. Never.
Actually, there was one time. An online system with DB/2 went down hard when BOTH mains power and the UPS accidentally got bypassed. Oops! However, the damage was to the indexing systems only, then the db detected and auto-fixed all the corrupted indexes. It took several hours and systems performance sucked hard during that time.
There is a difference when a contract is awarded to a Vendor (Cerner/VA) and to a Systems Integrator (Leidos/DOD). Many many vendor awarded contracts have failed over time, across industries.