By Rachel Z. Arndt | June
19, 2017
The Department of Veterans Affairs' pharmacy system could put
patient safety at risk due interoperability limitations, according to a federal
report.
The system, which is part of the VA's soon-to-be-replaced electronic health record, hinders pharmacists' ability to acess patient data and to work with non-VA providers' prescriptions, according to the report by the U.S. Government and Accountability Office. The agency recommends that the VA modernize its pharmacy services. The VA, which was not immediately available for comment, requested $7.7 billion in fiscal year 2017 for these services.
In the report, released last week, the GAO wrote that the VA's system, which is part of VistA, succeeds at three industry practices—eprescribing, checks for drug-drug and drug-allergy interactions, and the tracking of controlled drugs—but fails at three others: electronic exchange of prescriptions with non-VA providers and pharmacies, comprehensive clinical decision support methods, and perpetual inventory management.
The VA is limited by the capabilities of VistA, according to the GAO. For instance, the VistA Outpatient Pharmacy application, along with the computerized patient record system, does not allow clinicians and pharmacists to electronically accept or transmit prescriptions from or to non-VA providers and pharmacies. Patients therefore must resort to paper or faxed prescriptions, "a process that is time consuming and inefficient."
Furthermore, the VA is risking that prescriptions will be entered incorrectly at non-VA pharmacies. The GAO recommended that the VA come up with a plan for adding these capabilities.
The inability to send and receive prescriptions from non-VA providers poses a special challenge with the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act, which allows some veterans to use certain non-VA healthcare providers. "According to pharmacists at our site visits significant time and resources were required to process prescriptions for the program's patients," the GAO wrote.
Because these interoperability limitations hinder how VA providers work with non-VA providers, they could affect the VA's plan to retool the Veterans Choice program, since the new version of the program, like the old, depends on the ability of non-VA providers to provide care to veterans—and cites that ability as a way to provide more timely care.
Interoperability between the VA and the Department of Defense also is a problem, according to the report. The VA and the Department of Defense should be able to share patient information better. The report did not note how the VA's upcoming adoption of Cerner, which is what the DoD already uses, would affect this ability. In fact, though the report cited the need to modernize the VistA, the GAO did not comment on how the VA's implementation of a new Cerner EHR might affect its progress.
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Dr. David Shulkin wrote in the announcement of the Cerner adoption that when the two systems use the same EHR, it will "ultimately result on all patient data residing in one common system and enable seamless care between the departments without the manual and electronic exchange and reconciliation of data between two separate systems."
The system, which is part of the VA's soon-to-be-replaced electronic health record, hinders pharmacists' ability to acess patient data and to work with non-VA providers' prescriptions, according to the report by the U.S. Government and Accountability Office. The agency recommends that the VA modernize its pharmacy services. The VA, which was not immediately available for comment, requested $7.7 billion in fiscal year 2017 for these services.
In the report, released last week, the GAO wrote that the VA's system, which is part of VistA, succeeds at three industry practices—eprescribing, checks for drug-drug and drug-allergy interactions, and the tracking of controlled drugs—but fails at three others: electronic exchange of prescriptions with non-VA providers and pharmacies, comprehensive clinical decision support methods, and perpetual inventory management.
The VA is limited by the capabilities of VistA, according to the GAO. For instance, the VistA Outpatient Pharmacy application, along with the computerized patient record system, does not allow clinicians and pharmacists to electronically accept or transmit prescriptions from or to non-VA providers and pharmacies. Patients therefore must resort to paper or faxed prescriptions, "a process that is time consuming and inefficient."
Furthermore, the VA is risking that prescriptions will be entered incorrectly at non-VA pharmacies. The GAO recommended that the VA come up with a plan for adding these capabilities.
The inability to send and receive prescriptions from non-VA providers poses a special challenge with the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act, which allows some veterans to use certain non-VA healthcare providers. "According to pharmacists at our site visits significant time and resources were required to process prescriptions for the program's patients," the GAO wrote.
Because these interoperability limitations hinder how VA providers work with non-VA providers, they could affect the VA's plan to retool the Veterans Choice program, since the new version of the program, like the old, depends on the ability of non-VA providers to provide care to veterans—and cites that ability as a way to provide more timely care.
Interoperability between the VA and the Department of Defense also is a problem, according to the report. The VA and the Department of Defense should be able to share patient information better. The report did not note how the VA's upcoming adoption of Cerner, which is what the DoD already uses, would affect this ability. In fact, though the report cited the need to modernize the VistA, the GAO did not comment on how the VA's implementation of a new Cerner EHR might affect its progress.
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Dr. David Shulkin wrote in the announcement of the Cerner adoption that when the two systems use the same EHR, it will "ultimately result on all patient data residing in one common system and enable seamless care between the departments without the manual and electronic exchange and reconciliation of data between two separate systems."
Rachel Arndt joined Modern Healthcare in 2017 as
a general assignment reporter. Her work has appeared in Popular Mechanics,
Quartz, Fast Company, and elsewhere. She has MFAs in nonfiction and poetry from
the University of Iowa and a bachelor’s degree from Brown.
No comments:
Post a Comment