VA professional association asks Congress ‘to pause further deployments’ of new EHR

A leading association representing physicians and dentists across the Department of Veterans Affairs’ network of almost 170 medical facilities is calling on lawmakers to halt additional rollouts of the agency’s new Oracle Health electronic health record system until independent evaluations of the software can be conducted. 

In an Oct. 12-dated letter, the National Association of Veteran Affairs Physicians and Dentists asked Congress “to pause further deployments of the Oracle electronic health record (EHR) while protecting funding for patient care and safety at the sites already converted, and to allow deployments to resume only when VA has demonstrated that the system can support safe, reliable care.”

The request from the professional association — which says it represents the interests of approximately 20,000 physicians and dentists — was sent to the chairs and ranking members of the House and the Senate Veterans’ Affairs, Appropriations, Oversight and Government Reform and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs panels. 

Nineteen VA medical sites now use the new EHR system, with the agency completing its most recent go-lives at two facilities in Ohio and Alaska on Saturday. The modernization project is part of a broader federal push to deploy a single interoperable federal EHR system across agencies like the Defense Department, Coast Guard and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, although VA’s component of the initiative has been slowed by roadblocks. 

After facing a host of technical and usability challenges, cost overruns and patient safety concerns since the first modernized software rollout in 2020, VA paused most deployments of the Oracle Health EHR system in April 2023 to address the numerous issues plaguing the modernization project.

The Biden administration announced plans in December 2024 to resume deployments of the new software at four Michigan-based VA medical facilities in 2026. VA Secretary Doug Collins subsequently raised the total number of site rollouts this year to 13.

The missive, which NAVAPD disclosed on Thursday, comes on the heels of increased lawmaker scrutiny about the cost and future of VA’s massive modernization project, even as the agency has touted its successful resumption of EHR deployments. 

VA initially signed a $10 billion contract with Cerner in May 2018 to modernize its legacy health record system, known as the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, or VistA. Cerner was subsequently acquired by Oracle in 2022 and rebranded as Oracle Health.

The agency and Oracle moved last month, however, to extend their contract to include an additional $17 billion ceiling and three one-year option periods — a move that reportedly surprised lawmakers from both parties. 

Following a contentious House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing on the EHR modernization project last month, Democrat and Republican lawmakers voted 19-0 to subpoena both Oracle Chairman and Co-founder Larry Ellison and Oracle CEO Mike Sicilia to appear before the panel to further discuss the EHR modernization project’s cost and status.

As part of the fiscal year 2027 VA budget measure, NAVAPD asked top lawmakers to only allow EHR deployments to continue after VA “has completed an independent patient-safety assessment at the converted sites, corrected the critical deficiencies that assessment identifies, and documented each site's readiness with meaningful input from frontline physicians, dentists, and nurses, and reported the results to the Committees.”

The association also called for the committees to require that VA report and publicly disclose any documented patient safety events at the medical facilities using the new Oracle Health EHR software. 

In addition to this future reporting requirement, NAVAPD also asked the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee to obtain patient safety incident data from Oracle “when its executives appear under subpoena.”

A spokesperson for Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., who chairs the House committee, told Nextgov/FCW that the panel “has and will continue to have oversight of the VA electronic health records deployment and program to ensure it delivers modern healthcare for veteran patients and VA providers nationwide,” and noted that “as part of that oversight, the Committee intends to hear from the CEO of Oracle on November 19th in an open hearing on progress made, as well as the look ahead going forward.”