Health IT at the VA

The Veterans Administration is often held up as the gold standard for Health IT, but the technology publication NextGov reports:

An eight-year-old, $167 million project to develop a core computer application to schedule patient appointments at hospitals run by the Veterans Affairs Department has all but collapsed, and senior executives are worried about the repercussions it could cause on the Hill and in the White House, according to an internal memo obtained by Nextgov.

The botched effort comes on the heels of another scheduling program — a five-year, $75 million failed project started in 2001. That program, the Scheduling Replacement Project, was started by IT staffs in the VA healthcare regions serving Louisiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Texas, but after five years of work they failed to develop a usable product.

Gerald Manar, spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, says, "VA has a decade-long history of initiating IT programs, only to experience extensive delays and major cost overruns. The fact that VA has frittered away eight years and millions of dollars in developing the RSA, with no viable results and no end in sight, is extremely disappointing but, based on its track record, not surprising."

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