The Veterans Affairs Department's pharmacy re-engineering project - tagged as a troubled project last year - was put back on track after being divided into a series of smaller, incremental jobs.
The system, designed to modernize the way VA pharmacists perform medication ordering and dosage control, is now in production at a VA hospital in South Carolina and will expand to four more hospitals soon, VA chief information officer Roger "Baker said at an Oct. 6 congressional hearing.
The project is expected to reduce drug dosing errors, said Baker, who cited it as an example of how VA has significantly improved IT management by putting its projects through the Program Management Accountability System (PMAS), a process to track the delivery of VA products and services.
Records from PMAS show that VA has met more than 80 percent of the milestones for it major IT projects in fiscal 2010, Baker said. PMAS measures progress on 97 VA IT development projects.
"I know of no other CIO, government or private sector, who has this level of insight into such a large portfolio of development projects," said Baker, who noted that in 2009 VA met only 30 percent of its IT milestones.
"Most IT development organizations, public or private sector, would be ecstatic with meeting 80 percent of their committed milestones," he said at the hearing of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.
All IT projects must now deliver at least every six months advances in functionality that customers can use, or the project does not proceed, he said.
The department also avoided $220 million in costs in 2010 by eliminating poorly performing projects and lowering the risk and spending on others, he said.
Last year, VA canceled 12 and restructured 33 IT projects, including the pharmacy project, using the PMAS system, Baker said.
