During a House Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Technology Modernization hearing Monday, Chairman Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., pressed Kurt DelBene, the VA’s assistant secretary for information and technology and CIO, on his agency’s response to a Sept. 6 letter regarding problems with VA.gov.

The letter, sent by Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., chairman of the full House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, to VA Secretary Denis McDonough, sought agency explanations for recent VA.gov problems.

A VA IT investigation found that more than 56,000 veterans who submitted a request to update their dependents — mostly adding or removing spouses or children — “did not have those claims successfully processed by VA.gov,” VA press secretary Terrence Hayes said in a statement in September. Those IT errors and website issues had been occurring for some veterans as far back as 2011 and could affect their monthly benefit payments, the VA acknowledged in September.

Rosendale said that subcommittee members received the VA response to Bost’s letter less than an hour before Monday’s hearing. “It took two hearings by this subcommittee to shake this response loose, and that is absolutely unacceptable,” he said.

According to Rosendale, the letter stated that the VA’s Office of Information and Technology “brought on a new senior executive who directly reports” to DelBene, and that person “will ensure issues related to mishandled claims and veterans unable to access a benefit application are rapidly fixed.”

Rosendale then asked DelBene for the name of the executive and why they weren’t present at the hearing.

“I actually hold myself responsible for making any VA.gov fixes,” DelBene said, “and I’m not sure” who the letter refers to. “I’ll have to get back on reference to the actual executive” in charge, per the letter.

“I know all my senior executives, but I’m trying to give you the correct information in terms of who you’re referencing,” he added.

Rosendale expressed surprise at the answer and said that within a day, he expected DelBene to provide the subcommittee with the name of the senior executive in charge of VA.gov and explain why they weren’t present at the hearing.

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“Overall we still think there’s a ways to go. I don’t want to present the system as all set and ready to go,” Kurt DelBene, the VA’s chief information officer, said during a House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs hearing on the implementation of the VA’s EHRM initiative with Oracle Cerner. 

Oracle Cerner did not send a representative to the hearing despite being invited to.

“There are places we have significant concerns that we’re working with Oracle on: the incident-free time, not hitting standards is important, the end user responsiveness we think still has a ways to go, we think there are still functional workflow issues that still have to be resolved,” DelBene added.

The VA partnered with Oracle Cerner in 2018 to lead the development and implementation of its EHR modernization under a 10-year, $16 billion contract. But since then, the program has faced a number of significant challenges, some of which have reportedly brought harm to veterans. 

This led to bipartisan congressional criticism of the program and, ultimately, the decision in April by the VA to stop the rollout of the system at veteran hospitals until major patient safety issues are remediated.

Multiple members of Congress expressed frustration during the hearing that the VA and Oracle Cerner were not moving fast enough with improvements to the EHR system while spending billions in taxpayer dollars. 

“[Oracle] training and change management are still woefully inadequate and user satisfaction is still critically low,” said Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla., the ranking member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Technology Modernization. 

“I’m disappointed that Oracle Health isn’t here to participate in this conversation. I would like to stress that they are not present with us today. The fact that they didn’t send a representative raises major concerns for me and I expect better. I’m constantly losing faith in the process,” said Cherfilus-McCormick.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough will next year make the final decision regarding the exact timing of the continuation of the EHR rollout.

Meanwhile, the VA continues to use the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) EHR system in almost all of its VA hospitals. The modernized EHR system meant to replace VistA was delivered to five VA facilities before the department halted its nationwide rollout. The legacy VistA system has faced its own issues, including a lack of interoperability and nationwide access for veterans who change hospitals or move between states. 

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During a recent investigation into the issue, a VA IT team found that more than 56,000 veterans who submitted a request to update their dependents — mostly adding or removing spouses or children — “did not have those claims successfully processed by VA.gov,” Press Secretary Terrence Hayes said in a statement earlier this month.

The VA stated that the IT errors and website issues have been occurring for some veterans as far back as 2011 and could affect their monthly benefit payments. 

Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, expressed frustrations with top VA IT officials regarding the dependent claims issue during a House Committee on Veteran’s Affairs meant to examine the VA.gov website.

“We discovered that in August of 2021, there were a number of dependency claims that were being [unfairly] rejected from the system and so we worked with IT to investigate what that issue was,” Raymond Tellez, VA’s acting assistant deputy undersecretary for automated benefits delivery, said in response to Self’s questioning during the hearing. 

“And it wasn’t until January 2023 when we discovered there was a different problem, a bigger problem when we got feedback from our call centers from veterans who were having challenges with dependency who weren’t on the list that we had,” Tellez said.

Rep. Self questioned Tellez and VA CIO Kurt DelBene regarding the VA website’s quality assurance and quality checks given that a decade went by between 2011 and 2021 when the dependency claims issue went undetected and unresolved. 

The VA only discovered the full extent of the error in 2023 while looking into a technical problem that caused issues for roughly 900 veterans trying to file online appeals of their PACT Act of 2022 claims. 

According to the VA, more than 574,000 veterans filed a dependent status update through VA.gov and other official portals online since 2011, and of those, the agency is investigating 56,000 to make sure appropriate claims adjustments were made.

Some veterans may be owed backdated benefits due to the dependent claims issue, while others may have been overpaid. Nevertheless, VA officials said during the hearing that they would not request reimbursement from veterans who have received excess benefits.

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“I guess I’d say I’m cautiously optimistic,” DelBene told FedScoop on an episode of the Daily Scoop Podcast this week.

DelBene reasoned that the schedule the VA took in its initial attempt at rolling out the $16 billion EHR modernization program was “pretty aggressive” but that the department “learned a ton from the five sites that we’ve deployed to” in terms of the functional usability of the system as well as its resilience and reliability.

The VA in April suspended the rollout of the EHR as part of a major reset, saying it wouldn’t be brought back online until it is “highly functioning.” Then in May, the department announced it had reached a new agreement with Oracle Cerner — the contractor that is developing and delivering the EHR platform — that it said “dramatically increases” the government’s ability to hold the contractor accountable for reliability, responsiveness and interoperability.

“I feel good about the fact that we have taken a pause, that we have very concrete requirements, a number of them are actually put into the update to the contract. So we now have lots and lots of SLA, or service level agreement, dimensions that are actually spelled out with penalties,” DelBene said.

DelBene, a former senior executive with Microsoft, continued: “Coming from the commercial world, I looked at it from the vantage point, if we were the recipient of this contract, how would I feel about … the difficulty of meeting these expectations and how much I’m being held accountable? And I feel very good. We took all dimensions of the performance of the system.”

So why the caution? DelBene understands the reality that this is an extremely complex system the VA and its partner Oracle Cerner are attempting to deliver to clinicians.

“It’s really complex to change your health record system. I think we’ve done the right thing in getting to the pause, getting to criteria to launch again, and I am optimistic,” he said.

The Pentagon’s success in rolling out its modernized EHR, which is based around the same Oracle Cerner platform, gives DelBene hope as well — though it didn’t face quite the same scale and complexity as VA’s system.

“I think that’s a signal that that we can make it work. But there’s been a certain uniqueness and variability of the way healthcare is delivered in the VA. And we’ve had to do more customizations to actually just facilitate how physicians and caregivers work in the VA,” he said.

With those challenges in mind, things are getting better and VA is getting “further along” on the journey to be at a point where it will decide to resume the rollout of the EHR, DelBene said. However, “We’re not going to start our resume from the pause until we feel good about where we’re going next,” he added.

During the wide-ranging conversation with FedScoop, DelBene also discussed how he’s approaching digital transformation within the VA, the changes he’s ushered in in getting IT and cyber professionals better pay, and how he’s thinking about artificial intelligence.

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In an audit, the watchdog said it had detected previously unidentified critical vulnerabilities, uninstalled patches and network operating systems that are no longer supported by vendors.

According to the IG, the issues could “deprive users of reliable access to information and could risk unauthorized access to, or the alteration or destruction of, critical systems.”

In addition, the VA watchdog said it had identified almost twice as many devices on the health care system’s network than listed in an inventory and also found a range of weak access controls including missing video surveillance at a data center and inadequate fire detection and suppression equipment.

As a result of its investigation, the watchdog made six recommendations to the VA CIO to improve controls at the health care system because they are related to enterprise-wide information security issues similar to those identified through previous FISMA audits and information security inspections. It also made five recommendations to the director of the Northern Arizona VA Health Care System.

VA management agreed with the six recommendations made to the VA CIO.

The watchdog typically carries out such audits at VA facilities that have not been assessed in the sample for the annual audit required by the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014 (FISMA).

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In a missive sent on June 5 to Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough, Mike Bost, R-Ill., said that the agency has so far failed to provide requested documents setting out how the agency collects information about recusals.

According to Bost, House Veterans’ Affairs Committee staff in late April held a meeting with VA CIO Kurt DelBene and VA Special Counsel Michael Waldman, during which it was established that the VA did not have a formal process in place for recording ethics waivers.

Bost wrote: “[VA Special Counsel] Michael Waldman confirmed that VA currently does not have a formal process in place to document Mr. DelBene’s recusals – or for that matter recusals of any of its executives – including recusals relating to former employment. Mr. Waldman acknowledged that it may be a good idea to start a formal recusal documentation process and volunteered to start discuss the idea internally and inform the Committee of their conclusions.”

“I am concerned that, more than a month after meeting with Mr. DelBene, I have not received a response from you or your staff,” he added.

In a previous note sent to Denis McDonough on May 10, Rep. Bost said that during the previous late-April meeting, DelBene noted that he had only twice interacted with Microsoft or its employees: once to discuss a problem VA was experiencing with Microsoft Teams software, and once when he had dinner with his former chief of staff to provide career advice.

In the May 10 note, Bost requested that the agency provide a written summary of its plan to document the recusals of DelBene and other senior executives, or its reasoning for not adopting such a measure.

All federal employees are required to abide by the ethics stipulations set out in the Code of Federal Regulation, and failure to do so carries criminal penalties.

These include a requirement that federal officials take appropriate steps to avoid any actual or appearance of loss or impartiality in the performance of their official duties, including through personal or another “covered relationship.”

Prior to his confirmation as VA chief information officer in December 2021, DelBene was an executive at technology giant Microsoft.

Earlier in his career, DelBene worked in the Obama administration for a brief time, during which he led improvement work on Healthcare.gov as a senior adviser to the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. While working on Healthcare.gov, he helped to troubleshoot issues encountered during the first open enrollment period.

DelBene is also married to Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash.

In a statement to FedScoop, a VA spokesperson said: “The Biden Administration and VA are committed to the highest ethical standards for public officials. Consistent with those high standards, before joining the VA, CIO Kurt Delbene agreed to an Ethics Agreement whereby he was recused from involvement in Microsoft specific matters, including a number of specifically enumerated procurements and programs.”

He added: “VA and CIO Delbene have scrupulously adhered to that Agreement. In recent meetings with HVAC staff, it was requested that VA develop a formal process to document procurements or programs from which Mr. Delbene may be recused. VA has been working on finalizing such a formal documentation process and expects to respond to the Chairman Bost and the Committee shortly.”

Editor’s note, 6/6/21, 4:12 p.m. ET: This story was updated to include comment from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

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The VA last week announced a further delay of the EHR rollout within the Ann Arbor Healthcare System until late 2023 or early 2024 due to concerns about how well the health record system would interact with the Ann Arbor hospital’s vital medical research mission.

During a media roundtable, VA Under Secretary for Health Dr. Shereef Elnahal told FedScoop that if the medical research issues with the EHR are not fixed, similar concerns could arise at other other VA hospitals.

“So there are many VA medical centers that are heavy with clinical research because of their academic affiliations,” Dr. Elnahal said. “And so those centers will need this research functionality. It’s not just an issue with the Ann Arbor Hospital.” Dr. Shereef Elnahal, VA Under Secretary for Health

He added the full EHR deployment schedule was still being deliberated within the VA.

When asked about the current state of cybersecurity and veteran health data security within the VA, Dr. Elnahal told FedScoop that the VA’s Office of Information Technology has a special team focused on such issues led by Chief Information Officer Kurt Delbene. 

“He has a team focused on this and our agency is regularly engaged with interagency discussions after major cybersecurity incidents. And we are always trying to be proactive in limiting that risk,” said Dr. Elnahal.

He highlighted that the VA’s use of two different EHR systems has created additional difficulties and complexities to security within the agency. Most VA hospitals currently still run on the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) while the VA has rolled out the new Oracle Cerner EHR to five VA hospitals in the past two years with more rollouts expected later this year.

“Right now, as you know, we’re dealing with two different EHRs currently in place in our system. And so we have to contend with those risks, instance by instance, and make sure that the entire network is secure,” Dr. Elnahal said.

The Oracle Cerner EHR has faced grave performance issues since it was rolled out to five locations in October 2020, with repeated outages that, according to agency’s watchdog, have resulted in serious harm to veterans.

The implementation of VA’s new EHR system is expected to be delayed from its original estimates by at least one to two years while the cost has ballooned to be tens of billions more than originally estimated.

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Speaking Friday at a roundtable event with reporters, the agency’s CIO said it would appoint new staff as part of a wider scheme to hire 1000 new employees within its Office of Information and Technology.

The scheme will be used to hire new staff to work on technology transformation across a range of areas including the EHR program. Other areas where newly hired staff will work include financial accounting, supply chain and HR management systems.

appointing employees to jobs focused on transformation efforts including the update of financial accounting, supply chain and HR management systems, in addition to the EHR system.

He told FedScoop: “The EHR has been, as you rightly point out, a challenging project. We are already the largest Oracle Cerner customer in their EHR system. It is also a very complex environment with our medical centers and clinics across the U.S., and we are stressing Cerner in ways they had not been stressed before.”

DelBene added: “I think [the new EHR hires] will be able to focus our efforts in very clear ways, which is what product managers do great at which is here’s all the issues, here’s the underlying problems around those issues – now let’s get to a plan of attack that actually gets us the fastest possible improvement there,” he said.

New product managers brought in through the hiring scheme will be tasked with overseeing implementation of Oracle Cerner’s Millennium platform. The hiring scheme will use a new special salary rate for Technology workers, which is expected to be rolled out early next year.

“Let’s have them define a set of metrics around what great looks like that we’re going to track and we’re going to hold Oracle Cerner accountable for improving their performance as well,” DelBene added, commenting on the role of product managers.

According to DelBene, the VA will also use the lure of a remote-work environment to bring private sector talent to federal service.

The VA hopes that a new roster of product managers could help to hold Oracle Cerner accountable for IT system implementation through aggressive problem solving.

Since its initial rollout in October 2020, the Oracle Cerner EHR system has been roiled by outages and glitches that in some instances — including at a VA medical center in Spokane, Washington — have caused major harm to veterans.

In July, the VA led several federal agencies in submitting a Special Salary Rate (SSR) proposal to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), requesting a higher pay rate for federal IT management workers that fall under OPM’s 2210 occupational series.

The Special Salary Rate for cyber hires, if approved, would mark the first major governmentwide step to address its cyber workforce shortage.

DelBene said that OPM is expected to approve the new SSR pay hike by late January 2023.

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Her appointment concludes a months-long process to appoint a new cybersecurity leader at the agency following the departure of Paul Cunningham in February.

Sherrill has carried out the responsibilities of CISO at the agency on an acting basis since the departure of Cunningham. Previously, she was the executive director of enterprise command operations at the VA, in which role she oversaw the enterprise service desk, enterprise command center and major incident problem management teams.

In an internal email announcing her appointment on Monday morning, which was obtained by FedScoop, VA Chief Information Officer Kurt DelBene said: “I am proud to announce that effective August 28, Ms Lynette Sherrill will be the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Security and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). As CISO, Ms. Sherrill will lead cybersecurity programs and risk management activities to protect Veterans and ensure secure and reliable operation of VA information systems.”

He added: “In her seven months as Acting CISO, Ms. Sherrill has already led high-profile efforts, including the development of VA’s new Zero Trust First Cybersecurity Strategy – the heart of OIT’s approach to security excellence. Additionally, she is driving efforts to implement continuous evaluation of systems and metrics, allowing OIT to respond to cyber threats in real time.”

Among the challenges facing the incoming CISO at the VA will be responding to concerns about the pace at which the department addresses cybersecurity concerns. At a House committee hearing in June, the VA’s OIG highlighted that the VA’s fiscal year 2021 Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) audit showed “limited progress.”

Giving evidence to House lawmakers in the same hearing, VA CIO Kurt DelBene said his agency was working as quickly as possible to appoint a permanent CISO. 

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The meeting on Jul. 27 with Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., and other House members is understood to have focused on how to support and expand the work of the fund. TMF Executive Director Raylene Yung and Department of Veterans Affairs CIO Kurt Delbene also attended the meeting.

It came shortly before Senate lawmakers last week removed future funding for the TMF from a draft fiscal 2023 appropriations bill.

The appetite for TMF funding remains strong in the House, according to sources, and funding provisions are likely to be included in budget proposals from the chamber in the coming months.

“TMF funding remains a top priority for leader Hoyer, and I can’t see a situation in which House lawmakers would accept zero funding for TMF,” said one legislative source.

However, lawmakers in the Senate have previously expressed concerns over the allocation of extra public money to the fund without clear results and data demonstrating project outputs from the fund. 

The TMF was capitalized with $1 billion in the American Rescue Plan last year, which the fund’s board intends to spend by the end of the calendar year. So far, it has invested over $500 million in federal agency IT modernization projects.

three new investments, the TMF has well over half a billion dollars now invested. The TMF aims to allocate all of the funds provided for the American Rescue Plan this year.

House appropriators in June included $100 million for the TMF in draft budget legislation for the 2023 fiscal year. This followed a request in March from the Biden administration for the fund to be topped up with an additional $300 million.

The bipartisan legislation to create the TMF, led by Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., in 2017, was previously introduced by Rep. Hoyer.

Commenting on the meeting, Rep. Hoyer said: “I appreciated the opportunity to sit down with members and with Administrator Carnahan to strategize on how best to provide the TMF with additional capital so that this innovative, revolving fund can support more modernization projects across the federal government.”

He added:  “I am disappointed that the Senate FSGG Appropriations bill has once again neglected to fund the TMF, despite the TMF receiving $100 million in the House FSGG bill. The TMF has a proven track record of upgrading mission critical systems across many agencies, and has bicameral and bipartisan support. I remain committed to ensuring TMF funding is included in the final appropriations legislation.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated to include additional comment from Rep. Hoyer.

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