"Department of Veterans Affairs Motto" by JeffOnWire, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
After a long pause that started back in 2023, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs will make good in 2026 on its promise a year ago to restart and redouble its electronic health record modernization efforts.
The agency has ambitious plans for next year, with expansions expected at four sites each in Michigan and Ohio, three in Indiana and one each in Kentucky and Alaska.
WHY IT MATTERS
But as the VA pushes to accelerate the system's rollout, recent reporting in the Washington Post suggests that many serious challenges with the EHR system at existing sites are still potentially putting patients at risk.
The story cited medical staff working at VA locations currently using the EHR, which has been overseen by Oracle Health since its acquisition of Cerner in 2022.
Staff said patient notes sometimes disappeared, prescriptions displayed incorrect dosages, and other data anomalies caused concerns among clinicians.
Mike Faught, a case manager at Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center in Spokane, Washington, reported that in August he experienced a loss of access to patient records following a software update.
"It’s amazing to me that there are still so many problems," he told the Post. "Every time there’s an update, there are unintended consequences."
We reached out to Oracle for a statement about the status of system outages and errors, and will update this story if one is provided.
According to VA spokesperson Pete Kasperowicz, the Washington Post story spent too much time dwelling on initial rollout errors.
"The liberal-extremist Washington Post is cherry-picking years-old reports and events in a desperate attempt to make the Trump Administration look bad," he told Healthcare IT News by email this week.
He asserted that the VA has made "hundreds of improvements to the EHR since 2020" and cited the following metrics:
- Clinician and staff satisfaction with the federal EHR system has increased each year since 2022.
- Productivity has increased for all EHR sites.
- Total time per patient in the EHR system continues to decrease.
Additionally, Kasperowicz said, "as of September 2025, the VA’s EHR system saw a 96.68% incident-free rate over the prior 18 months, higher than the 95% target rate."
When the VA was asked about the kinds of incidents that make up the EHR system’s de facto 3.32% incident rate, based on the provided metrics, no further specifics were provided.
If there were instances of patient notes disappearing or incorrect dosages in prescription logs in 2025, the VA did not specify the causes nor explain how they are being addressed or resolved.
"Once complete, EHR will revolutionize the way VA works with the Department of War and veterans to deliver care by improving customer service and convenience for our patients," said Kasperowicz.
THE LARGER TREND
Challenges with the VA's EHR modernization effort are not new. System outages have plagued the program since its first rollout in 2020, with reports of widespread loss of EHR access as recently as March.
Patient safety issues related to medication lists and other key EHR functions have also been the subject of many VA Office of Inspector General reports over the past five years.
In February, Dr. Neil Evans, acting program executive director for the VA's EHR Modernization Integration Office, went before lawmakers on Capitol Hill to report that major technical issues had been tackled.
Evans was joined by Oracle Health and Oracle Life Sciences Executive Vice President Seema Verma. They said that more than 3,000 functional changes had been made to the EHR while rollouts were paused.
Deployments to the remaining 164 VA healthcare facilities should be accelerated, Evans and Verma said.
According to a GAO blog post earlier this year, "As of June 2024, VA had implemented more than 1,500 configuration changes to the system. But it still has not addressed about 1,800 additional changes that have been requested."
Meanwhile, the department cut the Veterans Health Administration's Integrated Healthcare Transformation contract, which included the not-yet-completed Healthcare Identity Management Program, in a larger agencywide purge.
That program was working on fixing patient identifier problems.
In 2022, the VA OIG found 149 instances of patient harm related to an "unknown queue" – when incomplete routing information failed to alert VA clinicians.
The VA EHR uses the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System and the Electronic Data Interchange Person Identifier platform to link clinical records before care is delivered to veterans. In some documented cases of veteran harm, OIG said the cause was that health information updates on misidentified patients went nowhere.
It remains unclear how this data accuracy problem is being addressed, and neither the VA nor Oracle has provided information despite multiple queries since March. If the requested technical information is provided, we will update this story.
In April, the VA added nine locations to the rollout schedule for 2026, bringing the total to 13.
ON THE RECORD
"In reality, mismanagement of VA’s electronic health record modernization effort by the Biden Administration’s political appointees resulted in a flawed program that was nearly dormant for almost two years," said Kasperowicz by email.
"The Trump Administration won’t repeat those same mistakes and is already moving quickly to accelerate deployment of the system and bring the project to completion as early as 2031."
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
