VA to focus on EHR deployment first, then innovative additions, official says 

The Department of Veterans Affairs is prioritizing the successful deployment of its new electronic health record system before it considers adopting innovative capabilities into the software, a VA official said on Tuesday. 

Speaking at GovCIO’s Health IT Summit, Dr. Neil Evans — acting program executive director of VA’s Electronic Health Record Modernization Integration Office — said the focus of the modernization project still remains on usability and operational effectiveness of the system, although he added that achieving those goals will also set the stage for the potential embrace of other tech solutions moving forward. 

“You’ve got to do [the EHR rollout] in a very rigorous and careful way to make sure that we do not disrupt operations in the nation’s largest healthcare system,” Evans said. “But that work is foundational work we need to do because it’s what allows us to then continue. It is a piece of the roadmap forward to say, ‘Let’s continue to innovate and deliver technologies.’”

VA is in the process of restarting deployments of the new Oracle Health EHR system at 13 medical facilities in 2026, after having paused most rollouts of the new software in April 2023. The software is designed to be interoperable with the Pentagon’s new modernized EHR system that is also from Oracle.

The moratorium on software deployments — with the exception of a March 2024 joint VA-Department of Defense medical facility in North Chicago — came after the modernization project was beset by a host of challenges that included patient safety concerns, technical outages and usability issues. The Oracle Health EHR system has been implemented at just six of the department’s 170 medical centers. 

Restarting the EHR modernization project has been a major priority for the Trump administration, with the department aiming to deploy the software at all VA facilities and medical sites by 2031. Evans said there will be more opportunities for VA to optimize the EHR system moving forward after it successfully restarts rollouts and fully deploys the software across its healthcare system.

“One of the big value propositions of delivering a common, commercial EHR is that we can, in the future, more easily orchestrate and deliver an integrated technological experience, because we will be on the same baseline,” Evans said, adding that this includes the potential use of next-generation technologies.

In June, VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence shared on LinkedIn that the department was making “real progress” in its push to deploy the EHR at the medical facilities next year and would be “up and running” with deployment activities at the 13 sites by the end of that month.

Evans noted that Lawrence has been conducting frequent visits to the 13 medical facilities scheduled to go live next year with the new software, and that collecting this firsthand feedback from clinicians is a particular priority for the department. 

“It sometimes gets boiled down to being thought of as a technology project,” Evans said about the modernization effort. “It’s really a people project.”

End users of the EHR, he added, will include roughly 400,000 VA staff, as well as between 120,000-150,000 trainees per year. 

“You add up those numbers, and you quickly get to above a half a million people who all have to navigate this change,” Evans said. “It’s a different way of thinking. It’s a different way of working. Every single one of them needs help to shepherd them through this.”