As federal officials work on multiple fronts to move healthcare providers toward greater use of EHR’s, a recent report suggests that they might want to turn at least part of their focus to the struggles of some of their federal colleagues.

According to news reports, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has “criticized the group directing the project to tie together the electronic health record systems operated by the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments . . .

GAO said the VA-DOD Interagency Program Office (IPO) needed to improve its planning and scheduling – and specifically its ability to create a master plan for the project – if the project is to succeed.

GAO also pointed out several project management basics that the program office needed to work on, including creating an integrated schedule of projects and conducting performance assessments to measure progress of those projects.”

Of course, this is not the first time the IT woes of these two agencies have been in the news.

Back in July, GAO officials claimed that efforts to “demonstrate interoperability” of DOD and VA electronic health record systems were being hampered by a “lack of leadership”.

In September, the VA’s own Inspector General reported that the agency’s “failure to manage a key element of its HealtheVet electronic health record system was part of a pattern of the mismanagement of complex information technology projects by the agency.”

And, as if to demonstrate the difficulties involved in making effective use of EHR’s, the GAO reported in November that DOD was underutilizing “post-deployment health reassessments (PDHRA) lacking for a substantial percentage of the 319,000 service members who returned from Iraq and Afghanistan between January 1, 2007, and May 31, 2008.”

In a way, the DOD/VA struggles may be an opportunity for officials at ONC. After all, the Beacon Community Program is being touted as an opportunity to bring attention to health communities that are doing HIT “right”.

So what if federal HIT policymakers put their shoulders to the wheel with the DOD/VA officials responsible for sorting out their IT problems? It would certainly give them some practical experience that they could then turn and share with others in the healthcare community.

And it would be a success story worth shining a light on.