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GCN Home > 09/12/05 issue

Agency IT provides relief after Katrina

At VA, e-health system streamlines patient evacuation; other agencies support relief efforts in various ways

By , GCN Staff

As Hurricane Katrina pounded the buildings and flooded the streets of New Orleans, the medical staff from the New Orleans VA Medical Center—located near the Superdome—didn't have to worry about lugging thousands of patient folders to higher ground.

Instead, medical-center employees spent their time worrying about how best to evacuate patients from the distressed region—knowing their treatment records were safe and secure in the Veterans Affairs Department’s electronic patient system.

The Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture program, or VistA, captures patient information and makes it available for clinical and administrative tasks at any VA medical facility.

As VA airlifted veterans who were patients in New Orleans to VA hospitals in Houston and other locations in the South as a result of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, officials also transported the center’s VistA backup tapes to the Houston VA Medical Center.

There, VA contractor Hewlett-Packard Co. restored the entire patient record database, said Robert Kolodner, VHA’s acting chief health informatics officer. “It will operate as it did the day before the hurricane.”

In addition to the New Orleans VA hospital, the Jackson and Biloxi, Miss., VA hospitals lost connectivity to the clinical network, leaving them to operate as islands.

Although Biloxi could not retrieve data from other VA hospitals, VistA, including electronic patient records, is fully functional within the hospital. VA will restore connectivity to the Jackson and Biloxi facilities as soon as possible, Kolodner said.

In the interim, VA made sure that pharmacy and allergy data was available to all sites so other VA providers could refill veterans’ prescriptions.

With VA’s system of electronic health records, patients’ full information, including medications and physician treatment orders, are accessible to any VA provider to which patients are transported.

“For all those people who will be scattered around the country, when they walk into a VA hospital and say, ‘I was getting care in New Orleans,’ their records will be available to pull up on the screen at whatever VA provider they go to,” Kolodner said.

More news on related topics: E-Government, Homeland Security, IT in Action, Lines of Business, Management, IT Security



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