Prescription Errors Plague Veteran Affairs
A Veterans Story
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Another Fumble by the VA
Another week, another absurd story about Veteran Affairs letting down our Vets once again. Are you a Veteran who receives prescription drugs from the VA? Well, I hope your medicine isn’t lifesaving because roughly 250,000 Veterans are at risk of receiving wrong prescriptions. If you’ve been following VA news, you know that they frequently have issues with their outdated systems; I’ve heard this firsthand from employees in the hospital as well.
The VA has been facing issues with its new medical records software, the Oracle Cerner Millennium system. It has caused so many errors that the VA paused its country-wide rollout to try and mitigate the fire from becoming uncontrollable. The new Oracle system must be fixed in conjunction with the VA's older health records system, Vista. Due to the systems not “talking to each other”, if a Veteran seeks care at a facility that has implemented Oracle and later goes to a facility using Vista, there is a high probability that their records will not be accurate. This can mean incorrect medication that could conflict with or worsen current symptoms, wrong dosage, ineffective medication for present symptoms, etc.
“In one instance, a patient with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury wasn't given medication they needed to treat adrenal insufficiency because the residential rehabilitation program they were in didn't see a prescription for the medication, according to Case's written testimony. The rehab facility used the Vista system, but the veteran got the prescription at a facility that used the Oracle system. After five days of worsening symptoms, the patient found the order for the medication on their personal cell phone and had to be transferred to a local emergency room for care, according to the testimony” (Kheel, 2024).
The executive vice president of Oracle Corp, Mike Sicilia, told lawmakers that Oracle made at least ten fixes in the software to correct this data issue, yet still, before releasing the final update, another issue was found. “In the interest of patient safety, we decided, of course, not to roll out anything that did not pass all final safety checks” (Kheel, 2024). Well, that’s good, Mike; I'm glad you guys are at least trying to fix the issue now after a quarter million Veterans were affected.
Mike said this is a very complex process involving multiple health record systems, and he is confident that Oracle didn’t “break” anything. This $10 billion software program had only been released to 5 VA sites before massive errors were identified; luckily, they did not roll this software out to 100% of VA facilities during launch.
For those of you who have not had the privilege of going to a VA facility, most of the medications must be mailed to you. It is unlike a normal pharmacy where you wait in line, and the drugs are in the back. Due to the large scale of supplies needed and the fact that there are only a handful of VA hospitals per state, your medicine needs to be shipped out from a warehouse, which can take weeks. Imagine you are about to run out of a prescription for something severely important, possibly life-threatening. Luckily for you, your VA package arrives a few days before your bottle is empty, but wait, what’s this? The wrong medication? The wrong dosage? What do you do now? Yes, you can call the VA and explain the urgency; regardless, it must be mailed out again. If you’re lucky, you can convince them to pay for overnight shipping or ask them to send your prescription to a community care pharmacy, but there’s no guarantee. This is just another example of how the benefits Veterans earn for their service are not as good as you think.
What’s New With Me
I switched my PhD from Industrial and Organizational Psychology to Doctorate in Strategic Leadership
I have 5 weeks left of my 16 week Six Sigma Black Belt course
I’m watching Masters of the Air, created by the same producers as Band of Brothers and The Pacific. Also, I started Black Sails on Starz.
I went on the podcast, Real One Percent to speak with Veteran Mike Dailey about our experiences in the Army. You can find that video here,
True that.
In the 1980's, I stopped going to the VA at 50 Irving Street in Washington, DC due to the incompetence.
There then, they had these huge towers of plastic holding thousands of pills.
The technicians would pour them into bags and hand them to the lines of Vets who stared glassy eyed from the mind altering drugs they were being administered.
It was a hard scene to observe when visiting.
Back then, they had 27 cigarette machines in the lobby.
None of the doctors spoke American English. Mine was Russian and I could barely understand him.
I got so tired of the wasted hours waiting to see a doctor and cancelled pre-appointments.
What made me finally stop using the VA was that I had an ingrown toenail cut out next to a guy who was having his foot removed. Blood everywhere.
I could go on with tales of horror but it made me use private health care for 40 years.
Then, in 2018, a guy told me Trump fired 10,000 corrupt VA employees and things had improved.
I went to the clinic at Ft. Dietrich and he was right. Things had changed.
But with the current administration, the corruption and laziness has returned.
It is a make work project. You go for an appointment, and 5 intake employees are in each department when only 1 is necessary.
After November 6th, hopefully it will go back to being the efficient organization is was for one brief shining moment.
BTW...please use PTSI (Post Trauma Stress Injury) rather than PTSD.
Injuries, mental and physical, can be healed. When you use "disorder" as the VA does, people think of mental and sexual disorders subconsciously.
Words have power.
It makes a huge difference, even if the VA refuses to change the designation...and labelling.
There is a reason the number one place for Vet suicides are in VA parking lots.
Changing PTSD to PTSI can help reverse that horrible statistic.
I listened to your Army experiences and wanted to let you know that when I was on active duty my son also joined in the same career field. Out BMTS is a Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas. My tech school was at Lowry AFB in Denver, Colorado. By the time my son joined the Air Force had moved tech training to Lackland, so my son went to tech training there. His first and only assignment was to Davis Monthan AFB, in Tucson, Arizona. He tried many times to go to another location but he spent ten years in and never got to move anywhere else. To this day it does not make sense to me how that happened because I moved many times. I thought the Army was not fair to you by not letting you experience more. Just my thoughts...