Health IT contract failure part of VA mismanagement pattern, inspector says

The Veterans Affairs Department’s failure to manage a key element of its HealtheVet electronic health record system was part of a pattern of the mismanagement of complex information technology projects by the agency, its Inspector General said in a report.

The VA earlier this year canceled a contract for the Replacement Scheduling Application (RSA), a HealtheVet subsystem that would let veterans request and view medical appointments in their EHR accounts. RSA was expected to be the next major roll-out of HealtheVet.

Final testing of the seven-year RSA development project was to be completed this year for a January 2010 deployment. In March, however, VA terminated the contract because the code it developed did not work. Department-level IT management weaknesses led to its failure, the IG said.

“The failure of the RSA project is linked to larger systemic problems relating to the management and implementation of IT projects within VA,” according to the report published Aug. 26. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the ranking member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, requested the OIG review.

VA selected the Southwest Research Institute in 2002 to develop and deploy the RSA software. But VA managers continually changed the direction, requirements, management and timing of the project, the IG said, pointing to the lack of IT management experience as a factor in the failure of VA projects.

“If VA had experienced individuals to effectively plan and manage the development and implementation of complex IT projects and an adequate system to monitor and identify program and contracting problems impacting the progress of a project, effective and timely decisions could have been made to either redirect or terminate the project,” according to the report.

VA had similar gaps with other failed projects, such as the Core Financial and Logistics System in 2004 and the Patient Financial Services System in 2007, the report noted.

In June, Roger Baker, VA’s chief information officer, put a hold on 45 IT projects that were significantly behind schedule and over budget until he could put in place a management system that would track their progress and problems that needed attention.

Ed Meagher, a former VA deputy CIO who is currently director of global health strategic initiatives at SRA International, said that Baker has the experience, leadership support, and “when he deals with the various failed and failing programs, the resources to turn this organization around. It won’t be easy or painless but I am sure he will get it done,” he said.

Meagher said he anticipated that Baker will work in the short term to solve immediate problems and deliver critical results to the field in 90 and 180 day increments.

“Issues around personnel, contracting, program and project management, and the need to establish a culture that thrives on innovation and transformation will take time to resolve,” Meagher said.

“The current series of VA OIG reports describe what happens when an entrenched, old school bureaucracy is allowed to operate without benefit of strong technical, managerial, and political leadership,” Meagher said.

When the RSA program was at serious risk of failure, VA brought in the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) through an interagency agreement (IAA) in 2007 to assist VA in IT project management and engineering services. The OIG found that VA also did not properly oversee that work either. The VA program official responsible for it could not identify for the OIG the work being performed by SPAWAR at the same time that VA had handed over much of the decision-making to SPAWAR and its contractors.

“Instead of resolving the systemic issues, the IAA seems to have perpetuated them and in some cases created new issues,” the report said.

As part of its review, the OIG also discovered that the General Services Administration awarded an $11 million contract on behalf of the VA to vendor CACI for IT services to support the planning and execution of IT investments without the knowledge of the VA’s Office of Acquisition, Logistics and Construction.

“No one [there] had any knowledge of any contract meeting that description,” the OIG report said.

VA’s Office of Information and Technology, however, said that it had an agreement with GSA that it act as a contracting entity for it. In fact, the office maintained a spreadsheet that showed since fiscal 2007 that GSA had awarded at least 68 contracts valued at more than $77 million for IT services.

“There is essentially no visibility within VA over these procurements. VA appears to merely fund the contracts through GSA,” the report said.   

The OIG said that VA needs to develop effective oversight systems and staff to fully manage and execute complex integrated IT programs. That includes providing the resources, structure and training for its IT and program offices for large-scale system integration. VA project status assessments need to be realistic and objective. VA should also expand the number of its contracting officers with large IT experience

The OIG report is located here.