VA deploys new EHR at 4 additional medical facilities

The Department of Veterans Affairs rolled out its new electronic health record system at four medical facilities in Ohio and Kentucky on Saturday — doubling the number of sites that have received the revamped software so far this year. 

The facilities that received the new system were the Cincinnati VA Medical Center, Chillicothe VA Medical Center, Dayton VA Medical Center and the Cincinnati VA Medical Center-Fort Thomas. The agency said Saturday’s deployments at the sites added more than 107,000 veterans and 7,200 VA clinicians to the new system.

The latest round of software go-lives comes as the agency moves to rapidly scale the modernization initiative across its network of more than 170 medical centers following years of program setbacks, patient safety concerns and cost overruns. 

VA initially signed a $10 billion contract with Cerner in May 2018 to modernize its health record system, which was part of an effort to promote interoperability with a similar Cerner system being rolled out across the Defense Department’s network. Cerner was subsequently acquired by Oracle in 2022 and rebranded as Oracle Health.

After implementing the new system at just five VA medical facilities, however, the agency instituted an operational pause on the program in April 2023 to remedy the host of issues plaguing the software. VA and DOD subsequently deployed the new EHR system in March 2024 at a joint healthcare site in North Chicago, which also marked the Pentagon’s final facility go-live.

Although the Biden administration announced initial plans to restart the modernization push in December 2024, VA Secretary Doug Collins has made the program resumption a top agency priority and bumped up the number of 2026 facility go-lives to 13 total sites as part of an accelerated deployment schedule. The agency is hoping to roughly double that number of facility deployments in 2027.

VA first resumed rollouts of the Oracle Health EHR system in April at four Michigan-based facilities. The agency plans to deploy the software at five additional VA medical facilities before the end of the year, including at sites in Indiana, Ohio and Alaska. 

VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence, who has been helming the agency’s EHR rollout efforts, said in a statement on Monday that the Trump administration is “rapidly expanding this modern EHR system throughout the department to improve experiences for both Veterans and VA employees.”

In a Monday LinkedIn post, Lawrence also said he attended a pre-deployment go-live event at the Dayton VA Medical Center on Friday and “had the opportunity to speak with the staff at the Dayton facility and hear their first-hand experiences preparing for the deployment and their enthusiasm to begin using the new system.”

The Trump administration requested $4.2 billion for the EHR modernization program in VA’s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget, although the package that passed the House last month set aside just $3.4 billion for the effort. 

Despite the modernization program appearing to be back on track, there have still been some lingering issues.

The Government Accountability Office released a report last week that found that the Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization office — the entity created in 2019 through a DOD-VA joint charter that oversees rollouts of the new system across participating federal agencies — needs to enhance its interagency coordination to address potential privacy and security vulnerabilities in the EHR software.

Collins told lawmakers last month that the Michigan EHR site deployments were “phenomenal,” although he also said VA still needs to go back and address ongoing issues at the first five medical facilities where the new software was deployed.