The Veterans Affairs Department doesn’t at the moment have an IT problem with the HealtheVet patient and clinical care system, grumbling in Congress notwithstanding. And CIO Robert McFarland wants to make sure it stays that way.
McFarland’s plan is to locate and repair any potential problems before the first line of code is written.
HealtheVet is an online system designed to replace VA’s legacy Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture program, or VistA, an electronic medical-records and clinical-care system used throughout VA’s 1,000 plus medical facilities.
To identify potential problems with the system, VA hired Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute last year to conduct a technical review before proceeding to system development. SEI, which finalized the report in February, found many potential problems—to the point the project may not be viable as originally planned. So VA went back to the drawing board.
“We did it right this time. We decided to take our preliminary project plan and have experts look at it to help us find the holes and identify the risks so we could come away with a better project plan that we could execute,” McFarland said.
He is optimistic that the new system will proceed because he vetted its design plans through an independent technical review. Despite learning that the system had numerous and significant weaknesses, he painted the technical review as a diagnostic tool to prevent future problems.
“The more problems you find up front, before you even lay pen to paper or write a line of code, that’s good,” he said.
The results of the review are “a more robust systems and engineering process and deciding the target infrastructure,” McFarland said. VA has since begun to modify its development plans and given its revisions to SEI to evaluate.
The SEI study addressed the design, organizational structure and testing of HealtheVet. Among its findings, it said the agency must:
Create an enterprise architecture and documented road map
Strengthen the program management office staff and operations procedures to handle a large systems integration project
Develop technical, operational and management baselines
Stick to software lifecycle processes and procedures.
The new system will be less expensive to maintain than VistA, have more ability to interface with other applications and be accessible by all veterans.
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