“Unfortunately, we discovered that safety concerns were voluminous enough and prevalent enough throughout the system that we had to disclose to 41,500 veterans that their care may have been impacted as a result of the system’s deployment as it is currently configured,” Shereef Elnahal, secretary for health at the VA said.
Patients may have had medications, appointments, referrals or test results delayed due to the postponed deployment of the new EHR system.
The VA began mailing letters to the affected patients on Oct. 12.
This comes as the VA said on Oct. 13 that it would delay the rollout of the Oracle Cerner EHR system until June 2023.
The VA had previously delayed future EHR deployments until January, but said it has discovered several additional technical and system issues that need to be resolved, including latency, slowness and problems with scheduling, referrals and medication management.
The department is working with Oracle Cerner to correct those issues.
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