VA North Texas Health Care System
Dallas VA Medical Center Announces Winners of VHA Health Information Technology Initiative
July 23, 2010
DALLAS – Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki announced the selection of 26 winning ideas in the Veterans Health Administration/Office of Information and Technology (VHA/OIT) Innovation Competition, and two were from Dallas VA Medical Center (VAMC).
VA is constantly looking for new ways to improve health care and how it is delivered, and employees who participated in this competition exhibited tremendous creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. Their ideas will help the department improve health care quality, access, and transparency in service to our nation’s Veterans.
An employee competition launched in February 2010, the VHA/OIT Innovation Competition solicited health care IT solutions that move VA forward in its transformation to a provider of 21st-century services. Over 6,500 ideas from department employees were received, and a panel of federal and private sector health care and IT leaders reviewed the top proposals and selected the winners. The chosen 26 innovations will receive funding and support for prototype development and implementation.
Winners from Dallas VAMC are:
• Dr. Roger Bedimo of Dallas who submitted Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS)-based automated queries and reports option to develop a graphical user interface-based program to run queries that identify all patients with a specified diagnosis, or receiving a specified therapy, and generate customized electronic reports with demographic, laboratory, treatment, and observed outcomes data of interest for each patient.
• Larry Olpin of Bedford submitted the idea to rename the current "primary care" tab/drop-down list in CPRS to “assigned providers” and expand it to include up-to-date contact information for all providers assigned to that patient, assigned clinic number, and case manager. If the patient was an active inpatient, it would also display his/her assigned intern and resident, if applicable. A new, second tab in CPRS would display a drop-down contact list with up-to-date contact information for all on-call providers (doctors and services) for the unit the patient was assigned to. These phone numbers would be blank unless the patient was an active inpatient. A new, third tab in CPRS would display a drop-down list of frequently-needed other phone numbers at the VA facility where the patient is assigned, or where he/she is admitted.
