Anyone out there want to advise a huge organization on developing a new medical scheduling application that works on web and mobile devices and makes it easier to quckly and securely communicate with clients?
If you’re interested, please see the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
The VA plans to replace its legacy medical scheduling application for its VistA electronic health record system and wants industry feedback, according to a story by Mary Mosquera. The medical scheduling application has been an essential component of VistA.
A more modern system could exponentially increase the VA’s ability to manage appointments and patient information, while coordinating associate services across all VA facilities, all to provide a single view of veterans’ medical records, Mosquera writes.
For more than two decades the medical scheduling application “has perform(ed) multiple interrelated functions to bring patients, clinicians and other resources together,” according to Mosquera’s story. But the problem is linking them all together, as each facility has its own VistA version. The scheduling package is extremely important because it also captures “data which enables VA to measure, manage and improve access, quality and efficiency of care, and operating and capital resources,” Mosquera writes.
Why look for a new app now? The existing application is more than 25 years old, “highly inefficient and no longer effectively supports the multiple linkages needed to engage patients, clinicians and ancillary services and support new models of clinical care delivery,” according to a Dec. 21 VA announcement in Federal Business Opportunities, Mosquera reports in her story. Industry responses to the request for information are due by Jan. 31, 2012.
VA also announced it has awarded a four-and-a-half-year, $30.5 million contract to Harris Corp. for the development and rollout of a data repository to create a centralized network performance monitoring system. This system will help VA better manage its computer network systems and more quickly find and fix problems as they arise, Bernie Monegain reports.
"The EMF FDR project will help ensure that the VA systems serving our veterans with the best possible healthcare are online and ready to go at all times," Jim Traficant, president of Harris Healthcare, told Monegain.
The new medical scheduling system will rely on web- and mobile-device services, Mosquera writes. “We expect that process will present significant risks, not just in adding a replacement software package to VistA, but also in affected business processes,” VA said in the request for information. So it anticipates establishing it incrementally to reduce some risks.
This is not the first time VA has tried to develop a scheduling replacement. Its first attempt failed in 2009 after eight years and $127 million on a vendor which did not deliver planned capabilities, Mosquera notes.
Deborah DiSesa Hirsch is an award-winning health and technology writer who has worked for newspapers, magazines and IBM in her 20-year career. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Rich Steeves
