alt Hacker NewsI'm amazed that city, county, state, and federal tech projects never want to clone best-of-show systems instead of starting from scratch. City needs a web site? Clone the best one you can find amongst the tens of thousands of cities already doing that. County jail needs tracking of inmate transports? Clone the best one you can find amongst the thousands of counties already doing that. State needs a sales tax system? Clone whatever other state system is the best. VA needs a system for hospital records? Don't develop from scratch, start by cloning the best system you can find amongst the thousands of existing hospital networks, and customize from there.
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A lot of government procurement is bound by strict "competitive bidding" laws that seek to give everyome and their grandmother a fair shake at the contract, in the name of avoiding graft, corruption, and bribery.
This has led to somewhat of an arms race where government workers desperately collaborate with contractors to find a way to sidestep or subvert the bid process and other contractors aggressively seek to inspect and enforce the process.
Developing in-house governmental talent, institutional knowledge, and capacity is of course strictly off the table, as it would reduce opportunities for private profit in basic government services.
That's what they did. If you read the article, it discussed the whole program as being a change from an in house developed system, to an off the shelf system.
> The program launched in 2018 to replace the aging computer system used across VA’s health care network, which serves more than 9 million veterans, with an off-the-shelf product that could handle many of the same tasks: organizing important information including appointments, referrals, prescriptions and patient histories.
> David Shulkin, the secretary at the time, announced that VA would negotiate a contract to buy the records system from Cerner without competitive bidding. VA leaders said they selected the program because the Pentagon already had purchased a similar Cerner system for the military’s more than 700 hospitals and clinics.