Vets see promise in Hagel and his short VA tenure

Hagel’s actions at the VA 30 years ago, together with his experience as a combat-wounded Army sergeant in Vietnam, would give him unusual credibility at the Pentagon, according to veterans advocates, something they say could help him tackle some of the military’s biggest problems, including military suicide and long-standing turf battles between two of Washington’s largest bureaucracies: the Defense Department and the Veterans Affairs Department...

Hagel’s biggest mark during his time at VA may have been in helping launch a well-regarded electronic health-records system now known as Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, or VistA. A small group of VA programmers were working to develop a decentralized hospital computer system for storing medical records, but they faced resistance from higher-ups.

“The establishment in VA didn’t want to see it decentralized,” said Tom Munnecke, one of the programmers. “The conventional wisdom was to centralize it on a mainframe in Texas.” Hagel met with the programmers. “He found out about it and liked it, so he pushed it at the right time,” Walters said. “Now it’s the most effective electronic health-record system in the country.” The programmers presented Hagel with a certificate of appreciation at a banquet in 1982. “He stuck his neck out,” Munnecke said. “It was a gutsy decision on his part.”...