WASHINGTON (Tribune News Service) — In the middle of December 2021, Bernadine Bank handed a letter to the chief of medicine at Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center.
After thanking her supervisor for the opportunity to start the Spokane hospital’s gynecology clinic five years earlier, Bank got right to the point.
“It is with a heavy heart that I write to inform you of my resignation from the VA,” the doctor wrote. “I think it will come as no surprise that I am leaving mainly because of the Cerner EMR.”
By then, it had been more than a year since the Department of Veterans Affairs began using Spokane as the testing ground for an electronic medical record system, or EMR, developed by Cerner Corporation under a $10 billion contract signed by the Trump administration in 2018.
While the project has been sold as an overdue update to the VA’s existing computer system, flaws in the Cerner system have left health care workers exhausted and demoralized, while the problems have also harmed scores of veterans in the Inland Northwest, according to the VA Office of Inspector General.
“I had hoped to be at the VA another 8 years before retiring as I get huge satisfaction from caring for female veterans,” Bank continued in her letter. “I was rewarded on a regular basis by patients who expressed gratitude for the care and attention our gynecology team provided. However I am mystified by and beyond disappointed at the Cerner product.”
More than two years after its launch in Spokane, employees at Mann-Grandstaff say the system has exacerbated staffing problems, pushing people like Bank to leave key roles and making hiring more difficult. The hospital’s decreased capacity has left more veterans to seek care in the private sector, which can mean longer wait times and higher costs to the taxpayers who fund VA care.
Although VA leaders in the Biden administration have paused the system’s rollout, acknowledging it is not ready to safely deploy in other facilities, it continues to be used in clinics and hospitals across the Inland Northwest, plus sites in the Midwest and southern Oregon.
In the year since Bank turned in her resignation letter, employees in Spokane say the system has shown little improvement, despite a change in tone from top VA officials and a change in ownership of Cerner, which was acquired by the tech giant Oracle in a $28.3 billion deal that closed in June.
The system made by Oracle Cerner, as it is now known, has been beset by prescription errors, incorrect patient information and delays in follow-up care caused by lost referrals. Inefficient “workflows,” the series of steps a user follows to complete each task, result in more time on the computer and less time with patients.
To offset the decrease in productivity caused by the Oracle Cerner system, the VA authorized hiring extra employees in Spokane. But in July, facing a budget crunch worsened by the increased payroll and reduced revenue due to the new system, regional VA leaders asked Mann-Grandstaff to shrink its staff by eliminating positions as they became vacant, according to emails obtained by The Spokesman-Review.
In interviews with The Spokesman-Review, more than two dozen current and former Mann-Grandstaff employees said the system’s flaws make working at the hospital physically and mentally draining and continue to threaten the safety of…
Read More: Spokane VA has reduced staff despite ongoing effects of troubled computer system