About 250,000 veterans may be at risk of being prescribed medicine they are allergic to or that would interact poorly with their existing medications because of issues with the Department of Veterans Affairs' new electronic health records system, a government watchdog told lawmakers at a hearing Thursday.
A VA official testifying at the same hearing stressed that the department has not found any instances of patients being harmed by drug interactions specifically caused by the data issues.
But at least one veteran wasn't given critical medication they were prescribed because their records were incorrect, and the VA has not adequately notified patients their prescription records may be wrong, the watchdog said.
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“We remain concerned that patients have not been informed of their individual risk, essentially being excluded as full participants in their care,” David Case, deputy inspector general for the VA, said at a House Veterans Affairs Committee technology modernization subcommittee hearing Thursday.
The faulty medication records are the latest problem to beset the rollout of the Oracle Cerner Millennium system that has been troubled enough that the VA paused adapting it at any more sites while it works to fix the network.
At issue this time is the way the Oracle system inputs data into a medical records database known as the…
