The Veterans Affairs Department, United States wants to be able to track when and how its physicians respond to medical alerts sent to them via the agency’s computerized patient record system (CPRS).
In its present capacity, the CPRS, which is a part of the Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) which is now an open source software in the healthcare IT space can presently only monitor whether providers click to acknowledge receipt of an abnormal result alert for diagnostic test or not. However, the system cannot report whether or not, the providers take any follow-up actions based on that alert and if they do, what those actions are.
The Veteran Affairs Department now wants a vendor to update its CPRS interface and workflows to enable the tracking and reporting of critical diagnostic test alerts and actions taken by the physicians. The department wants the vendor to provide source code for three functional and documented prototypes over the next 16 months.
This alerts re-engineering project is part of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Innovation Program, a VHA project to encourage and test innovative ideas from the field of health informatics.The VA’s notice about the alert project is online.