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> 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 co

> 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.
  - tolien 9y ago
    Sounds like the VA wants out of the contract, so both sides shouting how the other didn’t meet the terms is inevitable. HPE will wind up getting a few (hundred) million to go away and the cycle of failed projects continues.
- skywhopper 9y ago
  Honestly, a mature institution like the VA probably ought to be spending a significant portion of their IT budget on maintenance. There's a lot of systems to maintain. And new IT systems are not always the solution to problems, especially problems that aren't actually new. Since the phrase "archaic legacy systems" is left completely undefined, we don't even know what this means. "Legacy systems" can include stuff that was written a few years ago. I think it may actually be a bigger problem that nearly half of their $4.3 billion IT budget is being spent on _new_ systems. If this half-billion dollar contract with HP is any indication, that money is being poorly spent, and it would be better to invest in the existing systems, instead of trying to solve problems by adding more future-legacy systems to the mix.
  - cannonedhamster 9y ago
    archaic legacy systems = paper and Windows XP. What they should be doing is testing in a single location first to get the kinks on the system out and define facility needs, then expanding to 10 and then moving to roll outs by region. None of the problems that they have experienced should have made it past 6 months. I'm starting to think that it's purposefully incompetent people at the top that are causing problems, because without a doubt I could have run this program better but I'm pretty sure I couldn't get the job because I don't have a bachelor's.
  - kaitai 9y ago
    There is a big story here that is not being told, alluded to in one paragraph of the parent article. "[R]eplacing the decades-old VistA medical record system." VistA used to be the VA's electronic health record system. It is open source. It used to be maintained by the VA IT people with a host of third-party plugins. The name of the part physicians interacted with is CPRS or VA-CPRS. It has a good track record in improving prescribing accuracy.[1] It's cheap. [1] It's tops in physician satisfaction, for several years. [2] It definitely needs maintenance, and isn't getting it any more. Third party vendors have stopped producing for it, too. A big proximate cause: they're ditching the whole system to outsource to Cerner. Cerner makes a not-very-popular electronic health record system. Cerner did make more corporate donations to Republicans than Epic, the biggest EHR provider in the US. [3] Now, Cerner was already working for the DoD and there is some effort to harmonize systems, so it made sense in some practical ways, but it was a no-bid process. Spending close to $10 billion of taxpayer money without any bidding process... ugh. The lawsuit about that has been dismissed, though.[4] Jared Kushner was pretty proud that the VA chose "in two weeks" to go with Cerner and ditch open-source VistA. [5] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA [2] https://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/public/ehr2016#page=8 https://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/public/ehr2016#p... [3] http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/see-what-top-ehr-vendors-contributed-2016-presidential-campaigns http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/see-what-top-ehr-vendor... [4] https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2017/10/24/judge-dismisses-suit-about-cerner-va-contract.html https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2017/10/24/judge... [5] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/in-leaked-audio-jared-kushner-says-the-va-cerner-deal-happen-in-2-weeks.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information...

> 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.
- tolien 9y ago
  Sounds like the VA wants out of the contract, so both sides shouting how the other didn’t meet the terms is inevitable. HPE will wind up getting a few (hundred) million to go away and the cycle of failed projects continues.
skywhopper 9y ago
Honestly, a mature institution like the VA probably ought to be spending a significant portion of their IT budget on maintenance. There's a lot of systems to maintain. And new IT systems are not always the solution to problems, especially problems that aren't actually new. Since the phrase "archaic legacy systems" is left completely undefined, we don't even know what this means. "Legacy systems" can include stuff that was written a few years ago. I think it may actually be a bigger problem that nearly half of their $4.3 billion IT budget is being spent on _new_ systems. If this half-billion dollar contract with HP is any indication, that money is being poorly spent, and it would be better to invest in the existing systems, instead of trying to solve problems by adding more future-legacy systems to the mix.
- cannonedhamster 9y ago
  archaic legacy systems = paper and Windows XP. What they should be doing is testing in a single location first to get the kinks on the system out and define facility needs, then expanding to 10 and then moving to roll outs by region. None of the problems that they have experienced should have made it past 6 months. I'm starting to think that it's purposefully incompetent people at the top that are causing problems, because without a doubt I could have run this program better but I'm pretty sure I couldn't get the job because I don't have a bachelor's.
- kaitai 9y ago
  There is a big story here that is not being told, alluded to in one paragraph of the parent article. "[R]eplacing the decades-old VistA medical record system." VistA used to be the VA's electronic health record system. It is open source. It used to be maintained by the VA IT people with a host of third-party plugins. The name of the part physicians interacted with is CPRS or VA-CPRS. It has a good track record in improving prescribing accuracy.[1] It's cheap. [1] It's tops in physician satisfaction, for several years. [2] It definitely needs maintenance, and isn't getting it any more. Third party vendors have stopped producing for it, too. A big proximate cause: they're ditching the whole system to outsource to Cerner. Cerner makes a not-very-popular electronic health record system. Cerner did make more corporate donations to Republicans than Epic, the biggest EHR provider in the US. [3] Now, Cerner was already working for the DoD and there is some effort to harmonize systems, so it made sense in some practical ways, but it was a no-bid process. Spending close to $10 billion of taxpayer money without any bidding process... ugh. The lawsuit about that has been dismissed, though.[4] Jared Kushner was pretty proud that the VA chose "in two weeks" to go with Cerner and ditch open-source VistA. [5] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA [2] https://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/public/ehr2016#page=8 https://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/public/ehr2016#p... [3] http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/see-what-top-ehr-vendors-contributed-2016-presidential-campaigns http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/see-what-top-ehr-vendor... [4] https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2017/10/24/judge-dismisses-suit-about-cerner-va-contract.html https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2017/10/24/judge... [5] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/in-leaked-audio-jared-kushner-says-the-va-cerner-deal-happen-in-2-weeks.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information...