Becker's Hospital Review

54 CIO / HEALTH IT Cerner president blames unnamed competitor for 'fake news' about DOD's EHR rollout By Julie Spitzer I n a shareholders meeting one day after Cern- er signed a $10 billion, 10-year deal to be the Veterans Affairs Department's new EHR vendor, Cerner Presi- dent Zane Burke suggested reports that disparaged its work for the U.S. Defense Department were "fake news" that may have involved "one of our competitors," The Kansas City Star reported. In June 2017, VA announced Cerner would overhaul its legacy EHR and place the agency on the same health re- cords system as the DOD, which began its transition to the North Kansas City-based vendor in February 2017. It took VA nearly one year to sign the contract, after a num- ber of concerns delayed the award. The latest snag in the process involved an April 30 Pentagon report that found Cerner to be "neither operationally effective nor opera- tionally suitable" at the agency's first three pilot sites. But Mr. Burke struck back, defending Cerner's project with the DOD. "I have learned the term fake news, a little bit," Mr. Burke said, according to the Star. "On one side, there's been some concern about some of the delivery on the Depart- ment of Defense side. I'll tell you that's gone incredibly well overall. There were some known elements up front as we rolled out the first three sites. The plan always was to come back and do a remediation of those three sites, do an evaluation and make things better." Mr. Burke said he believes a competitor may be involved in the negative report's dissemination, but he didn't name a company. "If you had an ax to grind with us and wanted to perhaps keep us from getting to a Veterans contract, and you're one of our competitors, you might want to use some in- formation negatively. There was some negative informa- tion out there," Mr. Burke said. Cerner's most-well-known competitor, Epic, declined to comment on the Star report, but Epic's founder and CEO Judy Faulkner previously stated her company does not plan to challenge the VA's choice. "We've never chal- lenged anything," Ms. Faulkner said in March. "We don't do that. We feel it's the customer's right to pick whatever they want." An Epic spokesperson provided the following statement to Becker's Hospital Review. "Epic was not involved in publicizing the DOD report calling Cerner's MHS Genesis project, 'neither operationally effective, nor operational- ly suitable.' We would suggest that instead of dismissing these concerns as 'fake news' Cerner help its users by fix- ing the problems outlined in the report." n DOD's EHR isn't 'operationally suitable,' Pentagon report finds By Julie Spitzer T he Department of Defense hoped to complete its $4.3 billion EHR modernization project by 2022, but an April 30 report evaluating of the system's first pilot sites shows the EHR is "neither operationally effective nor operationally suitable." e Department's Operational Test and Evaluation office found the agency's first three implementations of MHS Gene- sis, the Cerner-based EHR system selected by the DOD, failed to "demonstrate enough workable functionality to manage and document patient care" and had "poor system usability, insuffi- cient training and inadequate help desk support." "Users successfully performed only 56 percent of the 197 tasks used as Measures of Performance. Non-standard data and the failure to adhere to Interface Control Documents hampered in- formation exchange with interfacing systems," the report reads. e agency's rollout of the new EHR took a "wave model" in which military facilities in the Pacific Northwest began transi- tioning in February 2017. Later, in June 2017, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced it would overhaul its legacy EHR and move to the same system as the DOD. However, the VA has been slow to award Cerner the contract amid interoperability concerns, and the DOD paused its project for eight weeks be- ginning in January and later said it wouldn't resume the rollout until 2019. e latest Pentagon report shows pilot users scored the system 37 out of 100 on the System Usability Scale, which is "well below the threshold of 70 that indicates acceptable usability," the report reads. "Training was insufficient to overcome usability problems, and a lack of documentation forced users to develop their own op- erational workarounds," according to the report. "User survey comments from the three [initial operational testing and eval- uation] sites reported similar problems that included undocu- mented and inconsistent workarounds, excessive system latency, inaccurate patient information, badly assigned user roles, poor user training, uneven assistance from on-site trainers and lack of visibility of the status of trouble tickets. Users from the four initial sites submitted 14,383 help desk tickets from January to November 2017, overwhelming the help desk's ability to resolve them." ough cybersecurity testing is in preliminary stages, initial findings show the systems' threat detection and incident re- sponse were inadequate, and its data protection mechanisms were not in accordance with DOD standards. e report also called the systems' scalability into question, cit- ing user-reported lag times and standardization issues. Robert Behler, director of the DOD's Operational Test and Eval- uation office, recommends the agency continue its pause until full testing is complete and all issues are resolved. n

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