The Veterans Affairs Department is on the cusp of deploying a massive electronic health records system and wants to know if robotic automation can help.
The VA originally planned to deploy the first instance of the new EHR system at the Mann-Grandstaff Medical Center in Spokane, Washington, this past March. However, officials announced in February that the initial rollout would be delayed, later telling Congress the agency planned to launch the new EHR system in July. That deadline has since been pushed further as the VA deals with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
As the system reaches full operating capability, VA health care providers and staff will need to ensure all health records—old and new—are digitized and linked with the correct patients and clinicians. Integrating and deploying an electronic health record system is incredibly difficult, made more so if the data being digitized is unstructured or otherwise not machine-readable—a perennial problem with health data.
VA is looking at robotic process automation, or RPA, as a potential solution and issued a request for information Wednesday to hear from the contractor community.
“The Department of Veterans Affairs is investigating automation solutions to streamline the flow of external clinical document sets into its electronic health record system,” the RFI states.
In the near term, VA plans to use the automated system to cull some of its records digitization backlog, which, wants automate digitization electronic health record backlog
