6 ms·

VA’s foray into Internet of Things faced ‘catastrophic failure’

56 points by us0r 9y ago

slavik81 9y ago
> When it was awarded in 2012, the RTLS contract represented an opportunity for the VA to shed its reputation as an old-school tech dinosaur and chart a path toward what leaders were calling a “transformation initiative.” That sounds a lot like a mid-life crisis.
- nikanj 9y ago
  That sounds a lot like ”I need a gold star in my CV to boost my career”
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Transformation was a $500 word that McKinsey folks and their ilk throw down. It amusing, as the McKinsey people will tell you that 70% of these things fail, but you will succeed, because this time, <reasons>. They usually deploy this stuff to enable centralization of large organizations with broad geographic or functional scope. These things always fail, because you cannot achieve cost savings and remotely manage the broad scope effectively. An example of this is the ridiculous project fractured here. Tracking crap with WiFi is what happens when some CIO in HQ “solves” a problem on the hospital floor.
- devonkim 9y ago
  This is usually synonymous with “devops” transformations as part of huge personnel problems (read: no young people want to join / stay) in most large, old companies that are facing a form of a late-life crisis that was plainly visible decades ago to anyone but the willfully blind. The standard situation of the usual F500 and government technology stack is a Petri dish of half-finished projects by an army of consultants maybe a couple years out of school charged at $300 / hr to the customer and everything is solved by throwing bodies at problems when a square peg was sold for a non-Euclidean hole because the decision-makers are so directly inexperienced in how technology works that 25-year old tech sounds like it’s cutting edge on a marketecture deck (or presume that something written recently couldn’t possibly be archaic already). It’s a lot like failed relationships with dozens of illegitimate children that you’re paying child support on.
keypusher 9y ago
> the department’s $543 million contract with Hewlett-Packard > The system [...] has been hailed as a way to potentially save millions of dollars Does not compute.
- cobookman 9y ago
  At first I thought that was their entire hp purchase number. Covering laptops, monitors, desktops, etc. Then I realized that nope. It's 543 million of professional services to build a RTLS system. Wow, I'm speechless.
  - vonmoltke 9y ago
    Where did you see in the article that it was just for professional services? The way the article presents it, that number includes everything related to the system (hardware, software, training, and so on).
- tolien 9y ago
  > Today, the VA spends more than half of its $4.3 billion IT budget on maintaining increasingly archaic legacy systems. Not difficult to see how they’d claim their Great New Thing would cost less to maintain than the Really Old Thing that nobody likes which was built by someone else. > employees were shunning another troubled IT program, called Catamaran, that manages supplies through predictive analytics > employees complained of frequent crashes that made it difficult to order supplies Also, if they stopped infecting people with Hepatitis and HIV (most likely among other things) due to using dirty equipment they would realise savings through not having to pay compensation and/or treat those people for the rest of their lives. That could also be done by following proper cleanliness procedures but that would require some leadership to achieve.
  - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
    The VA complaining that tags are too big for small things and HP complaining about the wifi tells you the level of intelligence going around here on both sides.
chuckdries 9y ago
> The VA has also vowed the project would prevent death and disease from unsterilized equipment, a persistent problem at the VA. Oh my god how is this a problem in the modern age? Stop wasting our money on gimmicks and focus on adopting modern hospital practices.
- cfghcrtyd 9y ago
  Dude: colonoscopies with dirty equipment led to a rash of hepatitis and HIV ...pretty much in the worst way imaginable. Following the links the article provides: Army veteran Thomas Mayo got a colonoscopy after the VA insisted on it - only to learn it may have left him with a chronic disease. 6 veterans who took the follow-up blood checks tested positive for HIV, 34 tested positive for hepatitis C and 13 tested positive for hepatitis B. But there is no way to prove [blah blah blah], and some [roll their eyes, accuse the victims of lying and accept paychecks to play devil's advocate, claiming maybe] the infections probably already existed. You pretty much have to figure anyone that cares enough about their health to subject themselves to an elective colonoscopy, probably has a firm awareness of their HIV/hepatitis status, before hand, including the patient zero carrying the source of the disease in each case. There are likely medical records capable of proving which patients were the infectious patient zeroes, and which contracted the disease as a result of the malpractice, even if those identities are never made public due to privacy law.
- jdowner 9y ago
  Agreed. This is tragic. These are the kinds of problems that I would have expected a military organization to have a pragmatic and robust solution to. I doubt you can rely upon a solid wifi connection in a field situation, so I bet they have some pretty solid procedures in place so that a human reliably find what they need without the need to google it.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Veterans Affairs is a cabinet level department, it isn't part of the DoD. It serves former military but it isn't military.
walshemj 9y ago
why would you track a catheter surly these are single use items that are never reused
- vonmoltke 9y ago
  The system is intended to cover all aspects of inventory control, not just tracking the location of reusable equipment. It's about knowing what they have and where it is.
skywhopper 9y ago
It sounds like the VA hospitals are suffering from major failures of protocol and procedure, none of which can be solved by IT systems, even if they work well. Turns out that computerized systems also require that humans follow protocol and procedure in order for them to function properly. But either way, these systems don't operate in a vacuum. Someone needs to analyze the real-world impact of these problems and develop a workflow and procedures that work with the hospital's organizational structure, physical layout, current and planned staff, training, auditing, procurement, patient scheduling, and accounting systems. No software contract for one piece with HP or IBM or Cerner is going to address all of that.
- ganoushoreilly 9y ago
  You're Spot on, the problems aren’t unique to IT, it’s a systemic policies / process / procedure failure.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Dowwie 9y ago
By paying consultancies half a billion dollars on new product development, they could potentially save millions.
- us0r 9y ago
  thats not even close to the final price. they'll probably drop another $250 mil then cancel the project. they dont even have this running in 1 VISN and there are over 20.
arca_vorago 9y ago
Having first hand experience with the VA I can't say I'm surprised, but really it doesn't matter that it's the VA, because I think most companies doing iot things already are likely going to face failure on their project as well. In this case I'm mostly thinking about the horrible security environment of the iot ecosystem, especially cellularly connected ones. "VA officials worried that the department’s $543 million contract with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Services to implement a real-time locating system, or RTLS, was careening off the rails" Wow. Let me guess, good ol boy contract kick-back where the good ol boy can't deliver as promised. It's a classic American tale. Great thing the government bid system is blindingly fair and egalitarian. Yup, that's it I bet. "VA officials have said work here stalled about 18 months ago due to contract issues"

56 points by us0r 9y ago

> When it was awarded in 2012, the RTLS contract represented an opportunity for the VA to shed its reputation as an old-school tech dinosaur and chart a path toward what leaders were calling a “transformation initiative.” That sounds a lot like a mid-life crisis.

nikanj 9y ago
That sounds a lot like ”I need a gold star in my CV to boost my career”
Spooky23 9y ago
Transformation was a $500 word that McKinsey folks and their ilk throw down. It amusing, as the McKinsey people will tell you that 70% of these things fail, but you will succeed, because this time, <reasons>. They usually deploy this stuff to enable centralization of large organizations with broad geographic or functional scope. These things always fail, because you cannot achieve cost savings and remotely manage the broad scope effectively. An example of this is the ridiculous project fractured here. Tracking crap with WiFi is what happens when some CIO in HQ “solves” a problem on the hospital floor.
devonkim 9y ago
This is usually synonymous with “devops” transformations as part of huge personnel problems (read: no young people want to join / stay) in most large, old companies that are facing a form of a late-life crisis that was plainly visible decades ago to anyone but the willfully blind. The standard situation of the usual F500 and government technology stack is a Petri dish of half-finished projects by an army of consultants maybe a couple years out of school charged at $300 / hr to the customer and everything is solved by throwing bodies at problems when a square peg was sold for a non-Euclidean hole because the decision-makers are so directly inexperienced in how technology works that 25-year old tech sounds like it’s cutting edge on a marketecture deck (or presume that something written recently couldn’t possibly be archaic already). It’s a lot like failed relationships with dozens of illegitimate children that you’re paying child support on.

keypusher 9y ago

> the department’s $543 million contract with Hewlett-Packard > The system [...] has been hailed as a way to potentially save millions of dollars Does not compute.

cobookman 9y ago
At first I thought that was their entire hp purchase number. Covering laptops, monitors, desktops, etc. Then I realized that nope. It's 543 million of professional services to build a RTLS system. Wow, I'm speechless.
- vonmoltke 9y ago
  Where did you see in the article that it was just for professional services? The way the article presents it, that number includes everything related to the system (hardware, software, training, and so on).
tolien 9y ago
> Today, the VA spends more than half of its $4.3 billion IT budget on maintaining increasingly archaic legacy systems. Not difficult to see how they’d claim their Great New Thing would cost less to maintain than the Really Old Thing that nobody likes which was built by someone else. > employees were shunning another troubled IT program, called Catamaran, that manages supplies through predictive analytics > employees complained of frequent crashes that made it difficult to order supplies Also, if they stopped infecting people with Hepatitis and HIV (most likely among other things) due to using dirty equipment they would realise savings through not having to pay compensation and/or treat those people for the rest of their lives. That could also be done by following proper cleanliness procedures but that would require some leadership to achieve.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  The VA complaining that tags are too big for small things and HP complaining about the wifi tells you the level of intelligence going around here on both sides.

chuckdries 9y ago

> The VA has also vowed the project would prevent death and disease from unsterilized equipment, a persistent problem at the VA. Oh my god how is this a problem in the modern age? Stop wasting our money on gimmicks and focus on adopting modern hospital practices.

cfghcrtyd 9y ago
Dude: colonoscopies with dirty equipment led to a rash of hepatitis and HIV ...pretty much in the worst way imaginable. Following the links the article provides: Army veteran Thomas Mayo got a colonoscopy after the VA insisted on it - only to learn it may have left him with a chronic disease. 6 veterans who took the follow-up blood checks tested positive for HIV, 34 tested positive for hepatitis C and 13 tested positive for hepatitis B. But there is no way to prove [blah blah blah], and some [roll their eyes, accuse the victims of lying and accept paychecks to play devil's advocate, claiming maybe] the infections probably already existed. You pretty much have to figure anyone that cares enough about their health to subject themselves to an elective colonoscopy, probably has a firm awareness of their HIV/hepatitis status, before hand, including the patient zero carrying the source of the disease in each case. There are likely medical records capable of proving which patients were the infectious patient zeroes, and which contracted the disease as a result of the malpractice, even if those identities are never made public due to privacy law.
jdowner 9y ago
Agreed. This is tragic. These are the kinds of problems that I would have expected a military organization to have a pragmatic and robust solution to. I doubt you can rely upon a solid wifi connection in a field situation, so I bet they have some pretty solid procedures in place so that a human reliably find what they need without the need to google it.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Veterans Affairs is a cabinet level department, it isn't part of the DoD. It serves former military but it isn't military.

walshemj 9y ago

why would you track a catheter surly these are single use items that are never reused

vonmoltke 9y ago
The system is intended to cover all aspects of inventory control, not just tracking the location of reusable equipment. It's about knowing what they have and where it is.

skywhopper 9y ago

It sounds like the VA hospitals are suffering from major failures of protocol and procedure, none of which can be solved by IT systems, even if they work well. Turns out that computerized systems also require that humans follow protocol and procedure in order for them to function properly. But either way, these systems don't operate in a vacuum. Someone needs to analyze the real-world impact of these problems and develop a workflow and procedures that work with the hospital's organizational structure, physical layout, current and planned staff, training, auditing, procurement, patient scheduling, and accounting systems. No software contract for one piece with HP or IBM or Cerner is going to address all of that.

ganoushoreilly 9y ago
You're Spot on, the problems aren’t unique to IT, it’s a systemic policies / process / procedure failure.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Dowwie 9y ago

By paying consultancies half a billion dollars on new product development, they could potentially save millions.

us0r 9y ago
thats not even close to the final price. they'll probably drop another $250 mil then cancel the project. they dont even have this running in 1 VISN and there are over 20.

arca_vorago 9y ago

Having first hand experience with the VA I can't say I'm surprised, but really it doesn't matter that it's the VA, because I think most companies doing iot things already are likely going to face failure on their project as well. In this case I'm mostly thinking about the horrible security environment of the iot ecosystem, especially cellularly connected ones. "VA officials worried that the department’s $543 million contract with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Services to implement a real-time locating system, or RTLS, was careening off the rails" Wow. Let me guess, good ol boy contract kick-back where the good ol boy can't deliver as promised. It's a classic American tale. Great thing the government bid system is blindingly fair and egalitarian. Yup, that's it I bet. "VA officials have said work here stalled about 18 months ago due to contract issues"