One employee, Dana Strauser, told the paper that administrators weren't just cancelling past orders but future ones as well.

“Doctors will put an order in for six months in advance and sometimes even a year in advance, and we were getting cancellations of those future orders,” she told the paper.


The VA had no comment on the Tampa situation for the paper.

The pressure increased on the VA after a January, 2017, conference call between national VA bosses and radiology managers, as they faced a backlog of over 325,000 orders for uncompleted scans nationwide.

The VA’s top radiologist, Robert Sherrier, presented findings that 12 states had VA centers with more than 5,000 orders outstanding, and that those could range as high as 29,000 in Columbia, South Carolina.

Since the call that figure for orders over two months overdue has fallen to just 31,000 nationwide.

The VA was in the news in May, when it launched a portal to give veterans online access to medical images.

My HealtheVet portal, the VA’s online personal health record, now offers veterans the ability to access, view and download X-ray, mammogram, MR and CT scans, and associated reports from the VA EHR online through its feature, VA Medical Images and Reports.

"Prior to the portal update, to get copies of X-rays, MRs and other imaging scans, veterans had to submit a written request, which was processed manually,” a VA spokesperson told HCB News. “That request could take up to 20 days to fulfill. Now Veterans can use the same automated tools they use to access other data in their electronic health record [My HealtheVet and/or Blue Button].”

The option goes hand-in-hand with VA Blue Button’s concept for simplifying patient access to personal health information by creating secure access to it online, and was first introduced in August 2017 at several VA medical centers to record veteran feedback.

Veterans with premium accounts will be able to access radiology studies three days after study reports have been verified.

Also in May, the VA made news with its deal with Cerner for an EHR revamp. At the time, Cerner president Zane Burke opined that the negative reports about the company's Department of Defense work is an example of "fake news."

Burke told shareholders at the time that the slam against its DoD work might have made headlines with the the help of a “competitor,” according to the Kansas City Star newspaper.

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