Government Healthcare Policy, Business and Technology

Two birds, one stone: VA's EHR to address interoperability and data centers

Federal Times: With the Veteran’s Affairs initiative to transition their electronic health records system from the current VistA program to a new system implemented by health IT company Cerner, officials hope to both make the agency interoperable with the Department of Defense’s system and to kickstart their data center consolidation efforts.

“I think that data center consolidation really needs to go hand-in-hand with this migration to the commercial Cener product. That’s where there’s a real opportunity to save a lot of money in the data center area. We’re spending a lot of money, but we can get a huge return from a data center point of view,” said Government Accountability Office director of IT management issues Dave Powner at a recent hearing on the subject.

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