The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has moved the health records of 23.5M military retirees to a Cerner-operated (Nasdaq: CERN) data center for processing this summer in preparation for the implementation of an interoperable electronic health record system across VA and the Department of Defense.
VA said Monday the data migration phase started in late spring as part of the department’s EHR modernization initiative, which aims to replace the Veterans Information Systems and Technology Architecture with the Cerner Millennium EHR platform.
“For decades, VA and DoD have been struggling to achieve interoperability and seamlessly share patient records between our health systems — placing an unfair burden on our Veterans and their families,†said VA Secretary and a 2019 Wash100 winner Robert Wilkie. “This data migration is the first step to solving that problem for good.â€
Cerner Millennium EHR supports the Pentagon’s MHS Genesis system and is designed to provide DoD, VA and community care providers access to service personnel’s medical records.
The department said more than 78B patient health records have been gathered from all VA medical centers, accounting for 50 terabytes of storage across 21 clinical areas.
Cerner supports VA’s EHR modernization effort under a potential $10B contract awarded in May 2018.
