Electronic Health Record Modernization System (EHRM)
Dept. of Veterans Affairs, Office of Enterprise Health Record Modernization
The Problem
To address these issues, the VA has implemented the EHR system across multiple clinics. However, to ensure the system remains secure, compliant, and adaptive to evolving cyber threats, Elements 5 (E5) was tasked with conducting thorough cybersecurity testing and strategic planning. This effort is crucial to safeguarding sensitive health information and ensuring the system's effectiveness and security for years to come.
The Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) electronic health record (EHR) system is critical for securely storing and maintaining veterans' health data. The legacy system presented significant challenges, often requiring veterans to manage extensive paperwork and repeatedly provide basic health information to different providers. Given that veterans often receive care from multiple sources, the lack of efficient data transfer added unnecessary stress and vulnerability to their health records.
The Solution
To address the VA’s data protection challenge, we first created an interagency change configuration management system to prevent disruptions and ensure consistency. We then assembled a team of system owners, firewall engineers, and cybersecurity personnel to act as a tracker and facilitator for network ports and CCB ticketing. These actions ensured data transfer and connectivity and streamlined the review and approval system for changes made to the EHR system.
The Impact
The EHR has been implemented in 6 VA medical centers, 25 VA clinics, and 104 remote VA sites. This new system is currently serving 13,000 end users and 168,000 of our nation’s veterans. E5 will continue to work with the VA to perform more testing and functionality analysis before developing plans to roll out to more centers across the nation.
The final step was to develop and manage Authority to Operate and Authority to Connect (ATO/ATC) packages, which ensured that legacy systems could be certified to operate in parallel with the new EHR system. Additionally, a review and insights feedback loop were created to continuously update this system.