As the Veterans Affairs Department makes its 10-year, $10 billion transition to the Cerner Millennium electronic health records system, the agency will have to maintain its proprietary VistA system at a cost $4.89 billion. However, as with VA’s past EHR programs, that estimate is likely well below what the actual cost will be.
In order to arrive at that estimate, VA officials looked at the costs of maintaining and updating VistA over the last three years, a figure they pegged at $2.3 billion. But a Government Accountability Office analysis of VistA costs casts that figure in doubt.
By GAO’s accounting, only $1 billion of that figure is reliable.
“The source data for the remaining $1.3 billion—which largely accounted for VistA’s infrastructure, related software and personnel costs—were not well documented,” Carol Harris, director of GAO’s IT and cybersecurity division, told the House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Technology Modernization. “As a result, VA’s subject matter experts were unclear on how to account for VistA versus non-VistA costs. Furthermore, the department omitted costs related to additional hosting and data standardization in testing from the total spend.”
Based on GAO’s analysis, spending on VistA over those three years was likely much higher, Harris said.
For example, in June, VA officials told GAO the agency spent $238 million on additional hosting services each year. Shortly thereafter, VA officials came back to GAO with a new number: $950 million. Ultimately, officials ended up leaving the line item blank.
“When we talked with VA subject matter experts, they agreed that the $950 million was off base, but the fact that that additional hosting line item was not included in the $2.3 billion estimate suggests that the number is higher, ..
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