The Department of Veterans Affairs has launched plans to upgrade infrastructure at several Medical Centers across the country to prepare them for the implementation of an Electronic Health Record Management (EHRM) system. The Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) in Des Moines, IA consists of 13 buildings for a total of 300,000GSF and has undergone upgrades to align its existing infrastructure with the standards set by the National Office of Information and Technologies.

The original facilities contained 28 Telecommunications Rooms and two server rooms, as part of the infrastructure upgrades these spaces were condensed into a single server room. Additionally, building management systems, access control points, and server room systems were enhanced to complement the new infrastructure.

The new system will provide staff with a straightforward and structured procedure for accessing patient records. Improvements were made to the facility’s fiber optic backbone, redundant fiber pathways, entrance rooms, dual pathways of multimode fiber to each telecom room, cable pathways, telecom rooms, and replacing all Cat cabling with Cat6A.