The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced Friday that it will be delaying the second rollout of its Cerner electronic health record due to a surge in COVID-19 cases among employees.

As reported by the Federal News Network's Jory Heckman, the new go-live date at the VA facility in Columbus, Ohio, has been pushed from March 5 to April 30.  

"This is in no way a decision that was made based on the readiness or lack thereof of the Columbus facility," VA Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Melissa Bryant said during a call with reporters this past week, Heckman reported.  

WHY IT MATTERS  

As Heckman wrote, Cerner's EHR system is "fully built out" in Columbus, and the go-live delay stems from a dearth of workers available for scheduled training.

According to Bryant, hundreds of employees at the Chalmers P. Wylie Ambulatory Care Center were absent from work as of Thursday, which led to the lag – especially for so-called super-users.  

"In a nutshell, your super-users are training the trainers, basically the ones who are going through doing the sort of beta testing," she said.   

In other words, she continued, the users are "the ones who have greater functionality and capability in their usage of the Cerner Millennium tool."  

Bryant said the agency's goal is to stay on target with its revised deployment schedule released late last year.   

"We can't guarantee that the pandemic won't cause any further issues," she said, as reported by Heckman.  

However, she added, "The reason that we feel confident within VA senior leadership that we should be able to keep the schedule on track is because of the fixes that we made following through strategic preview."  

THE LARGER TREND  

The news is the first from the VA regarding the EHR rollout since the announcement in late 2021 of Oracle's planned acquisition of Cerner for $28.3 billion.   

Although the agency has faced turbulence with its Cerner deployment over the past year, VA representatives told Healthcare IT News that they don't expect the deal to affect the rollout.  

"While it is not VA practice to comment on the business decisions of our vendors, we do not expect Oracle's acquisition of Cerner to impact VA's electronic health record modernization process," said a VA spokesperson this past week.  

ON THE RECORD  

"As we see the pandemic surge in the Columbus community, we need to support the medical professionals while they focus their attention on meeting the healthcare needs of their patients," Dr. Terry Adirim, program executive director of the Electronic Health Record Modernization Integration Office, told Heckman.

Kat Jercich is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Twitter: @kjercich
Email: kjercich@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.