VA EHR rollout expanding to 9 more facilities in 2026

The Department of Veterans Affairs has announced that it will deploy its federal EHR system at nine additional medical facilities next year, with complete VA EHR implementation expected by 2031.

The announcement follows the December 2024 news that the VA would deploy the system at four sites in Michigan in 2026.

The federal EHR aims to connect the VA, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Coast Guard and other federal partners to allow clinicians to easily access a veteran’s full medical history in one location.

However, the VA EHR platform has faced over 800 major performance incidents since October 2020, including outages, performance degradations and incomplete functionality, according to a 2024 VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) report.

The rocky EHR rollout has had severe consequences, including patient harm and even a reported death linked to system deficiencies, an additional OIG report found.

While VA updated its EHR contract in May 2023 to include stronger performance metrics and more significant financial penalties for Oracle Health, outages persist. Six VA medical centers, 26 community clinics and remote VA sites experienced disruptions with the federal EHR this week, the agency confirmed to CNBC.

Despite the ongoing issues, VA leadership remains committed to the EHR modernization effort.

“America’s Veterans deserve a medical records system that’s integrated across all VA and DOD components, and that is exactly what we will deliver,” Doug Collins, VA secretary, said in a press release. “We can and will move faster on this important priority. But we’re going to listen to our doctors, nurses and vendor partners along the way in order to ensure patient safety, quality and customer service.”

VA will announce the nine additional facilities later this year, following planning sessions that include officials from VA’s Electronic Health Record Modernization Office, regional and local VA medical leaders, VA clinicians and EHR vendor Oracle Health.

According to the press release, VA will pursue a market-based approach to site selection for its deployments going forward to scale up the number of concurrent implementations and support staff efficiency.

Officials also noted that VA will adopt a standard baseline of EHR products, workflows and integrations based on subject matter expert recommendations to “ensure successful Federal EHR implementation, accelerate deployments, simplify decision-making, and support future optimizations.”

Hannah Nelson has been covering news related to health information technology and health data interoperability since 2020.