Cerner attempts to hang on to $10 billion VA contract with help from former VA officials

Cerner is a Kansas City-based Health IT corporation involved in electronic health records (EHRs). To say the company has benefitted from Obama's healthcare law requiring doctors to keep electronic health records is an understatement.

In 2015, Cerner won the Defense Department's Healthcare Management System Modernization contract, at the time the most lucrative electronic health record contract in history: $4.3 billion. (Cerner partnered in the bid with two other firms: Leidos and Accenture.)

Then, last year, Cerner won something even bigger: a contract to replace the EHR system of the Department of Veterans Affairs. This time, however, the contract was worth $10 billion and there was no competition at all. VA Secretary David Shulkin decided to simply award this contract to Cerner because he wanted the VA to use the same system Cerner was developing for the Defense Department.

Then, this past spring, Trump removed Shulkin from the VA. That left the Cerner contract sort of up in the air. Peter O'Rourke is the current acting VA Secretary and just last week a new House subcomittee was formed – the Technology Modernization Subcomittee, nested within the House Committee on Veterans Affairs – to oversee the VA's EHR transition, should the contract even go through.

As you can imagine, Cerner needs a lot of well-connected assistance to keep this uncertain $10 billion contract with the VA moving forward. And they've recruited more than just lobbyists to help. Cerner formed an advisory board that includes several former government executives. On the venn, each member is denoted as a “consultant.”

One such consultant, Karen DeSalvo, worked as the National Coordinator for Health IT in the Health and Human Services Department prior to being nominated as Assistant Secretary for Health by President Obama. In fact, Cerner enjoys the help of four members of the Obama administration involved in either health or veterans affairs. The fifth is Cerner CEO Neal Patterson; President Obama appointed him to the Health IT Policy Committee, a group of industry insiders who “steered” the Obamacare mandate that doctors convert to and utilize electronic medical records.

There's one former Cerner in-house lobbyist not included on the venn: Brooke Yoder, the wife of Kansas Representative Kevin Yoder. Brooke's exact title at Cerner didn't appear on any of the various internet searches I conducted, as her history with the company seems to have been scrubed. She is, however, listed on OpenSecrets as a Cerner lobbyist. Below, a PDF from the Iowa State Government website also connects Brooke Yoder with the Cerner Political Action Committee (PAC).