The Department of Veterans Affairs has met a milestone after transferring the health records of 23.5 million veterans to a Cerner Corp. data center.
VA said July 29 this step reflects the decision to replace the Veterans Information Systems and Technology Architecture with a Cerner electronic health records system that undergirds the Pentagon’s Military Health System.
“For decades, VA and DoD have been struggling to achieve interoperability and seamlessly share patient records between our health systems — placing an unfair burden on our Veterans and their families,” said VA Secretary Robert Wilkie in a release. “No Veteran, family member or caregiver should have to carry boxes of paper, medical and service records around. This data migration is the first step to solving that problem for good.”
Over 78 billion records have been collected from VA medical centers, accounting for 50 terabytes of data storage across 21 clinical areas of patient health records, VA said.
The Cerner Millennium EHR will provide shared access with VA, Defense Department and community care providers. Eventually, service members’ medical records from their years of active duty will be housed in one system.
,quality(10),blur(50))