VA official touts progress on EHR modernization project
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The agency is undertaking “a no-fail mission to deliver a Federal EHR at every VA medical center by 2031,” VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence said.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is making “real progress” in its push to deploy its new electronic health record at 13 VA medical facilities next year, according to a top agency official.
VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence said in a Monday LinkedIn post that the agency is “currently up and running with deployment activities at 11 sites across Michigan, Southern Ohio, and Indiana going live in 2026,” and is also planning to begin activities at two additional medical facilities in Cleveland and Anchorage later this month.
VA initially signed a $10 billion contract — which was later revised to over $16 billion — with Cerner in May 2018 to modernize its legacy health record system and make it interoperable with the Pentagon’s new health record, which was also provided by Cerner. Oracle later acquired Cerner in 2022.
The agency paused most deployments of its modernized EHR system in April 2023, however, to address patient safety concerns, technical issues and usability challenges at the sites where the new software had been deployed.
VA announced in December that it was moving out of its operational pause and was looking to deploy the new EHR system at four Michigan-based medical sites in mid-2026. VA Secretary Doug Collins subsequently announced in March that the agency was planning to implement the modernized software at nine additional medical facilities next year, bringing the total to 13 sites.
As of this month, the new EHR system has been fully deployed at just six of VA’s 170 medical centers. During a congressional hearing last month, however, Collins told lawmakers he was optimistic about efforts to speed up rollouts of the new software, saying that “once you get momentum, you can add more sites as you go.”
The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal, which was released in May, also included a roughly $2.2 billion boost for the rollout of the new EHR system.
Lawrence said he is holding regular bi-weekly working sessions with the team at Oracle Health about the modernization project, and that VA is making a concerted push to complete the deployment.
“We’re rolling up our sleeves to tackle the tough issues head-on, from pharmacy modules to referrals, and eliminating outdated processes that are holding us back,” Lawrence said. “This is a no-fail mission to deliver a Federal EHR at every VA medical center by 2031.”
Even as VA works to ramp up its activities ahead of next year’s planned deployments, congressional lawmakers are still looking to shore up the modernization project. Last week, Republican lawmakers on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee put forward a discussion draft of legislation that seeks to improve oversight and governance of the EHR software’s rollout.