Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

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The story of what’s gone wrong with the effort emerges from hundreds of pages of internal documents and dozens of interviews with current and former officials, congressional staff and outside experts. The Mar-a-Lago Crowd and the White House frustrated efforts to hire a qualified leader to run the project, according to interviews. The people now in charge have no experience in health care. They have gone against expert advice. And they have been consumed by infighting. A key lawmaker has called the program’s leadership “deteriorating and rudderless.”

The VA justified the no-bid contract on the basis that it would create “seamless care” for veterans moving between the military, the VA and the private sector. As originally articulated, “seamless care” meant improving medical outcomes and cutting costs by helping doctors make more informed decisions.

But Wilkie and his team no longer talk about “seamless care.” Instead, they say the new system will let VA doctors access records from the military — a capability that to a large extent already existed. Some doctors who raised concern about this new direction were removed from the project.

VA spokesman Curt Cashour declined to answer specific questions, saying that “efforts thus far have been successful and we are confident they will continue to be successful.” The White House didn’t provide answers to a list of questions. A representative for the Mar-a-Lago trio declined to comment. The company providing the new software, Cerner, declined to comment, but sent an email to veterans groups warning about “negative media coverage, including a piece from ProPublica that we anticipate being published this week.”

As the VA moves ahead with the program, it’s increasingly following the lead of the Defense Department, which is already installing the same software at its own hospitals. But the DOD’s program isn’t going well, either: When four military facilities tested the software, it routed orders incorrectly so that lab tests went unfulfilled, and users swamped the help desk with more than 14,000 trouble tickets. An official DOD review in April said the software put patients’ health at risk by providing inaccurate medical data and delaying care.
 
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