The Sorry State Of Veterans' Health Care

Malou Innocent | US News | April 4, 2013

Here is a sad lesson in government waste. Since 2008, the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) have spent over $1 billion to create an integrated electronic health record (iEHR). Four years and $1 billion later, not a single line of code has been implemented.

As way of background, Defense and VA use separate medical databases that can neither translate nor communicate their data in a functional way. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2008 directed the departments to develop a single electronic health record system by 2009. They pushed that scheduled date of completion to 2017 after the plan hit a number of management, oversight, and planning snags, detailed in full here by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The final cost estimate also exceeded initial expectations – from $4 billion to nearly $12 billion.