Veterans Affairs Department Chief Information Officer Roger Baker has a message for his IT staff: If their projects get out of hand, he will cancel them.

VA has a long history of information technology projects lagging in development for years, missing deadlines while running through millions of dollars. That tradition has stopped with the termination last month of 12 projects behind schedule and over budget, Baker said.

"I'm an ogre. They know I'll stop a project. If they miss a schedule, if a problem arises, they'll stop and say, ‘What hard decisions do we make? If we don't, he'll come stop us,'" he said in an interview.

VA stopped 45 underperforming IT projects for review in summer 2009, later restarting 32 and ending 12. One is still being evaluated. Terminating those 12 projects will save $54 million in fiscal 2010, Baker said.

The reviews have been expanded to include all of VA's approximately 282 IT projects. All IT projects now have deadlines to produce interoperability within the next six months. Should projects fail to produce useful components by deadline, they'll face more scrutiny and eventual termination, Baker said.

"In the private sector, what brings the team together to make hard decisions is the profit component. We don't have that in the government, and I believe something else has to take its place — dates," he said.

By standing up and killing failing projects, Baker hopes to change the culture at VA to deliver savings through better technology. He also wants the IT department to roll out projects incrementally, introducing new technology as it becomes available rather than waiting for an entire project to be complete.

The most notorious canceled project would have streamlined appointment scheduling at VA hospitals. VA currently has no unified system to schedule all appointments needed throughout hospitals, and a program that was supposed to fix that failed after 10 years and more than $150 million.

Starting a new scheduling system is top priority, Baker said, and it will be carefully designed and watched over to ensure success. Terminating unneeded programs leaves more funds for systems that are truly needed, such as this one.

"We will start a new scheduling program this year when we have an approach mapped out," he said.

Baker and his staff have set themselves apart from the rest of the government by eliminating programs and making examples of program failures, said Jerry Manar, who retired from the Veterans Benefits Administration in 2004 after 30 years.

Manar is now the deputy director of the Veterans of Foreign Wars' national veterans services; he said the VFW is pleased to see the VA's beleaguered scheduling project scrapped. Manar said he hopes the new scheduling project will have strict oversight and deadlines so it doesn't run off track again.

"It appears that the current administration in the VA has taken a very businesslike approach to reviewing IT projects and getting a better handle on what they have and where they're at, seeing which ones have stalled and are spinning, wasting money," Manar said.

Not all canceled projects will be resurrected, Baker said. One such program unlikely to resurface is Organization Service, which was supposed to create a standardized system for managing organizations, locations and medical devices.

Another doomed project may be Delivery Service, intended to improve connectivity between applications in the HealtheVet system, a gateway to veterans' health benefits and services.

"There were things being developed that we could never identify who the customer was," Baker said.

Even though projects may be on hold or canceled, that doesn't mean work comes to a halt. Baker said employees will continue to do tasks the way they have always done them.

In the example of the scheduling system, Baker said, "These tasks are currently being done manually, and they'll be done manually until the automation is done."

Baker's efforts have won him support from diverse groups. The American Legion is glad to see an agency willing to scrap ideas that haven't worked, said Barry Searle, director of the Legion's veterans affairs and rehabilitation division.

"We don't want to see money wasted. If they're clearing out systems that don't work, that sounds reasonable," he said.

Dr. James Martin, an emergency room doctor at the North Chicago VA Medical Center, said he expects the cancellations to help VA stretch its $3.3 billion IT budget, which will remain flat in fiscal 2011.

"It's good from an executive decision standpoint. I'm sure he's weighed heavily the decision to cancel projects," said Martin, professional vice president for the American Federation of Government Employees' Local 2107.

Canceled projects

The Veterans Affairs Department has canceled 12 information technology projects for being over budget or behind schedule:

• ASSISTS Modification — Case Management: To manage employee treatment cases after compensation claims were approved by the Labor Department.

• Bar Code Expansion: To use bar codes to identify patients for lab collections, medication administration and other tasks.

• Chemistry & Hematology: ADC Automation (CHDR): To support interoperability between VA and Defense Department drug-ordering systems.

• Delivery Service: To improve connectivity between applications in the HealtheVet system, which is a gateway to veteran health benefits and services.

• Enrollment System Redesign (ESR) v4: To restructure the hosting of an income verification program.

• Lab Data Sharing and Interoperability (LDSI) Terminology Support: To routinely map and maintain clinical terms and update lab files.

• National Teleradiology Program — Radiology: To promote better sharing of studies for teleradiologists.

• Organization Service: To create a standardized system for managing organizations, locations and medical devices.

• Pharmacy Re-Engineering Pre1.0: To replace existing national and local drug files and control drug inventories.

• Radiology Standardization: To create and deploy standard radiology terminology files.

• Rights Management Server (RMS): To improve security of e-mails and attachments.

• Scheduling Replacement: To create a centralized outpatient scheduling application.

SOURCE: Veterans Affairs Department