Veterans' Electronic Health Record Modernization Oversight Act of 2017

Floor Speech

I rise in support of H.R. 4245, the Veterans' Electronic Health Record Modernization Oversight Act of 2017.

When I first came to Congress back in 2007, as a veteran myself, one of the questions we asked was--Electronic medical records had been out there for quite some time. The VA was a pioneer in their VistA System, on VistA, on managing health, and it is not just a database. As Dr. Dunn knows well, these are important diagnostic tools and they have to be right.

But the thing that every veteran for 20 years was saying was: Why do we have one medical record in the Department of Defense, so when we leave the Army, the Navy, the Marines, or the Air Force, we drop off a cliff--we all carry around a paper file they print out to us--and then we try to get back into the VA and it is an entirely different system that doesn't talk to one another?

It seems pretty self-evident that from the time you raise your hand until the time you are buried with honors, it would make sense that we had a joint electronic medical record. That was the genesis of this.

I am proud to say that it was a long road, but we had the signing of the Cerner contract.

What this piece of legislation does is--and I want to be very careful about--we do this many times here, we pass a piece of legislation, pat ourselves on the back, and send it away, only to watch it die a horrible death in the executive branch, not be implemented correctly, or not provide our oversight.

This simply says--and Dr. Dunn was exactly right--this is a $16 billion 10-year project. I want to be clear, though: that is our current projection.

Everyone in here knows that if we get a 10 percent delay and a 10 percent cost overrun, we will probably be relatively happy with that. That is over a year, and it will be a nearly $2 billion addition. That money will have to come from somewhere. It will slow down implementation. We saw reports early last week that there were serious concerns in the pilot program that are out there.

So what this does--and I, once again, thank the chairman and the majority staff for recognizing this is our responsibility. We will not shirk that here--it asks them to report to us. It let's us stay on top of this before it becomes a crisis. Because every single one of us here knows that it is coming some day--that we are going to hear about misinformation, something dropping through, a cost overrun--and this just gives us that added security.

This is a project that cannot fail. I have witnessed in my time in Congress too many IT failures, specifically at the VA: a contract is signed, it is going to happen, and it is a good thing. It has the potential to, as again the gentleman said, revolutionize how we deliver care. But it has the potential to go in the wrong direction if we are not doing our constitutional right of oversight.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support this piece of legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I think this is, once again, the legislative branch, as it was meant to be, taking back its oversight responsibility. We are going to authorize this and we are going to appropriate the funds. I think it is only prudent that we have another layer of oversight to make sure that this huge, huge project, nearly unprecedented, upgrade in integration of electronic health records of anywhere in the world, happens correctly.

Mr. Speaker, I encourage a ``yes'' vote on this, and I yield back the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source