Everyone likes a good competition, particularly with a potential $9 million gold carrot available to the victors. On Jan. 9, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced a challenge for software developers to create a new medical scheduling system for VA's nationwide health system.
Three groups could be awarded up to $3 million each for creating an open application program interface (API)-based system to replace components of VA's 25-year-old scheduling software in its VistA electronic health record (EHR) system.
"This contest marks a major change in direction by VA, away from software that is so customized that only VA can use it, toward open standards and commercial systems that build on proven practices," said VA Secretary Eric Shinseki in a statement.
Of the nation's 22.3 million veterans, nearly 8.6 million were enrolled in the VA healthcare system.
Roger Baker, chief information officer at VA, explained to Healthcare IT News that the department opted for a contest after an earlier 10-year-long, $127 million effort to replace its Medical Scheduling Package (MSP) failed.
The replacement system "delivered absolutely no working software over a 10-year period," he said. "And it really led to a lot of changes here at the VA about how we go about software development to avoid exactly that kind of problem."
Fast-forward to now: Baker said one of the biggest changes from 10 years ago is the private sector's ability to provide the kind of software that met VA needs. The estimate three years ago was that a private sector scheduling package would provide 80 percent of the department's requirements. Now, Baker said, that number continues to increase, making it a more than viable decision to reach out to private-sector developers.
"While $3 million is relatively small from our perspective on a risk mitigation standpoint, you can do a lot of software work for $3 million that will get us a long way," said Baker.
He likened the contest to a "risk-reduction" plan, as it essentially makes certain that there are scheduling packages that will indeed work and meet VA requirements, such as being compatible with open source. From there, the department will pursue a completely separate acquisition for the VA scheduling package and most likely for the integrated EHR that will launch in all VA facilities and potentially all Department of Defense facilities.
"We will know that there are packages that work with the open-source by the time we go out for an acquisition, so we're not putting significant dollars at risk."
Baker said the benefits of replacing the antiquated system are four-fold. "The main good thing that will happen from a VA standpoint is we will get much better utilization of our critical resource, and that is our clinicians' time." New software will also mean that the VA will be able to integrate its telehealth scheduling into live, in-person scheduling with its physicians. The third benefit comes from "fewer missed opportunities" in terms of doctor-patient matching, which is currently a common occurrence.
Finally, Baker said patients would have more do-it-yourself options. "We want to provide things like online scheduling capabilities: pick your day, tell us what you're going to need, and we'll have it set up for you." n
