The Department of Veterans Affairs has said that it has complied with a congressional mandate to make its electronic health records interoperable with the Defense Department’s data through the Joint Legacy Viewer system, Federal News Radio reported Friday.Jared Serbu writes VA officials told members of the House Veterans Affairs Committee Thursday that the department achieved compliance with interoperability standards for EHR systems April 8.
VA officials said the department have trained approximately 55,000 clinicians on the use of JLV and that it expects the number of trained personnel to reach 120,000 by the end of 2016.
The department noted that it plans to make JLV into a web-based interface that will work with VA’s VistA and DoD’s AHTLA EHR systems through the Enterprise Health Management Platform.
VA plans to field eHMP across its medical centers in 2017, Serbu reports.
David Shulkin, VA’s undersecretary for health, told the House panel that the department might push for the VistA Scheduling Enhancement program instead of the Medical Appointment Scheduling System contract it awarded to Epic Systems in 2015 due to cost concerns.
LaVerne Council, VA’s assistant secretary for information technology, said at the hearing that her office has proposed a “digital health platform†that aims to deploy a  software-as-a-service, cloud-based platform designed to replace the VistA EHR system and consolidate all the department’s health IT tools into a single platform.
