In a holding pattern

The Veterans Affairs Department has put on hold 45 information technology projects, most of them involving software applications for healthcare, while it subjects the projects to internal review and the strictures of a new project-management scheme.

The announcement comes after the department’s own inspector general in May chastised the VA for its lack of IT management rigor.

It also comes as a deadline looms for the VA to achieve its goal of making its clinical IT systems “interoperable” with those of the Defense Department’s Military Health System.

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki and Assistant Secretary for Information and Technology Roger Baker made the joint announcement about the program holds on July 17.

Of the 300 IT projects under way at the VA, the 45 now on hiatus are at least one year behind schedule or more than 10% over budget, although “there tends to be a pretty good overlap on both of those,” said Baker, who started at the VA May 20.

The targeted 45 were a logical place to begin implementing what Baker calls a Program Management Accountability System, or PMAS, based on timetables, milestones, and the development and release of software and other deliverables. All 300 projects eventually will be placed under PMAS, but for now until the holds are lifted, no further development on the projects will occur and spending will be “minimized,” according to the VA. For most of those projects, the holds will amount to “a temporary halt”—giving their project managers time to adapt to the new system, Baker said. “We’re expecting most projects to be restarted in the Oct. 1 timeframe or so.”

But Baker also said the VA is running too many IT projects for all of them to survive.

“And so, we’re going to make the hard resource decisions so we can decide what projects are our highest priority ones and they will have the resources they need to succeed,” he said.

One project involves a controversial contract to replace the laboratory software currently a part of the VA’s public-domain VistA electronic health record system with a proprietary lab package developed by Cerner Corp., according to the VA. A Cerner spokeswoman declined to provide a company spokesperson to discuss the decision. The VA contract with Cerner was nearly $2.7 million for the first year, with additional one-year contract extensions for up to eight years available as options priced on an “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity basis.”

Interoperability between VA and defense healthcare organizations has been a goal since the Clinton administration, but according to testimony at a recent congressional hearing, making the Sept. 30 deadline set by Congress in a 2008 defense authorization law appears in doubt.

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