The Veterans Health Administration, says Fortune magazine, is the “most wired and cost-effective health system in the land.” The article credits the VA’s embrace of health information technology with its consistently higher quality and patient satisfaction scores than many private-sector hospitals. By 1999, all of the VA’s 1,300 hospitals, clinics, and other facilities had an electronic medical record and by 2000, every VA hospital was using bar-code scanners to ensure that the right patients were receiving the correct drugs. In the mid-90s, when poor quality rather than high tech was a more apt description of the VA, only 29% of VA patients received pneumonia vaccinations. In 2005, 94% did, which reduced hospital admissions by 4,000 patients per year. Screening for cervical cancer jumped from 64% in 1995 to 91% in 2005. The VA’s EMR system also allowed VA patients displaced by Hurricane Katrina to receive seamless medical care at any VA facility. The VA is also applauded for delivering high quality at lower cost. The average cost of healthcare spending for a VA patient is $5,000 compared to $6,300 for other Americans. The VA’s adoption of health information technology is made even more remarkable, according to the article, because the U.S. government is spending only $111 million this year to fund EMR projects—small sums compared to health IT budgets of $10 billion for England and $2 billion for Canada.
