'We took a broken system and just broke it completely’

Trump touted a project to make veterans’ health care seamless, but some doctors say it’s a disaster.

President Donald Trump last year hailed a multibillion-dollar initiative to create a seamless digital health system for active duty military and the VA that he said would deliver “faster, better, and far better quality care.”

But the military’s $4.3 billion Cerner medical record system has utterly failed to achieve those goals at the first hospitals that went online. Instead, technical glitches and poor training have caused dangerous errors and reduced the number of patients who can be treated, according to interviews with more than 25 military and Veterans Affairs health IT specialists and doctors, including six who work at the four Pacific Northwest military medical facilities that rolled out the software over the past year.

Four physicians at Naval Station Bremerton, in the Puget Sound, one of the first hospitals to go online, described an atmosphere so stressful that some clinicians quit because they were terrified they would hurt patients, or even kill them. Prescription requests came out wrong at the pharmacy. Physician referrals failed to go through to specialists. Physicians were unsure how to do basic things such as request lab reports...