OIG Interim Report: Review of VHA’s Patient Wait Times, Scheduling Practices, and Alleged Patient Deaths at the Phoenix Health Care System  (read summary)

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Bottom of Page #4 – AUDIT TRAILS – “During our review at Phoenix HCS we determined that certain audit controls within Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) were not enabled. This limited VHA and the OIG’s ability to determine whether any malicious manipulation of the VistA data occurred.

To ensure our future oversight ability is not compromised, we requested VA’s ability to determine whether any malicious manipulation of the VistA data occurred. To ensure our future oversight ability is not compromised, we requested VA to immediately enable this audit trail capability at all VA medical facilities. VA completed this action.

We are also reviewing and assessing differences between EWLs for the Phoenix HCS. VA’s national data showed an EWL (Electronic Wait List) of less than 300 veterans; however the Phoenix EWL included approximately 1,400 veterans.”

What does this mean ?  

This means the electronic footprint, the “audit trail”, to identify when computer activity (and/or manipulation of records) took place, was disabled.  

Was this disabled to stop people from seeing who did what and when ?  Or was this the default position for the hardware used, and never enabled ? 

A key question when determining the extent of potential illegal activity.