The first stage of a multibillion-dollar military digital health program championed by Jared Kushner has been riddled with problems so severe they could have led to patient deaths, according to a report obtained by POLITICO.
The April 30 report expands upon the findings of a March POLITICO story in which doctors and IT specialists expressed alarm about the problem-riddled software system, describing how clinicians at one of four pilot centers, Naval Station Bremerton, quit because they were terrified they might hurt patients, or even kill them.
Experts who saw the Pentagon evaluation — it lists 156 “critical” or “severe” incident reports with the potential to result in patient deaths — characterized it as “devastating.”
“Traditionally, if you have more than five [incident reports] at that high a level, the program has significant issues,” a member of the testing team told POLITICO.
The project’s price tag and political sensitivity — it was designed to address nagging problems with military and veteran health care at a cost of about $20 billion over the next decade — means it is “just another ‘too big to fail’ program," the tester said. “The end result everyone is familiar with — years and years of delays and many billions spent trying to fix the mess.”
The unclassified findings could further delay a related VA contract with Cerner Corp., the digital health records company that began installing the military’s system in February 2017. The VA last year chose Cerner as its vendor, with the belief that sharing the same system would facilitate the exchange of health records when troops left the service. The military’s contract was approved in 2015 under President Barack Obama.
The VA contract, originally pushed by Kushner, has recently been delayed by concerns expressed by close friends of the president, including Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter, who has advised the president on veterans’ issues, and West Palm Beach doctor Dr. Bruce Moskowitz, who got White House approval to participate in the discussions.
