Funding for VA medical computing system in jeopardy

The future looks grim for an ambitious plan to modernize the Veterans Affairs Department's medical computing system, which would upgrade the existing Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, known as VistA.

A House Appropriations subcommittee recommended last week that the department receive just $11 million in fiscal 2006 for the new system, far short of the $311 million President Bush requested. The full committee will vote on the bill Wednesday.

The proposed system, called HealtheVet, would include Web-based electronic medical records, a data repository for longitudinal and population studies, management and administrative tools and other functions. The $311 million request would have been the first installment of a 10-year, $3.5 billion plan.

VA did not provide the subcommittee with an adequate explanation for the expense, said John Scofield, a spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee. "We typically receive fairly detailed justification material," he said. "There was no information whatsoever on what the new money for this program would be spent on."

VA officials declined to comment for this article.

Two other factors likely hurt the HealtheVet cause. First, VA stopped implementation last year of its Core Financial and Logistics System after an unsuccessful pilot in Bay Pines, Fla. That termination raised concerns about VA's ability to manage the larger-scale HealtheVet system.

Then, in order to avoid another late-in-the-game failure, VA Chief Information Officer Robert MacFarland hired Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute to evaluate the plans for HealtheVet. In its April report, the institute said the system was risky and poorly planned.

Despite the funding cut for HealtheVet, the subcommittee's recommendation for the overall VA budget added $1.1 billion over the president's request. "We put the money where our priorities are, and that's medical services," Scofield said. The subcommittee added $1 billion for medical services and did not approve instituting fees for such services, as the president proposed.