VA restarts EHR rollout, hires staff

The Department of Veterans Affairs restarted its electronic health record rollout on April 11, ending a three-year pause with four Michigan hospitals going live at once. (federalnewsnetwork.com) The new system went live at Ann Arbor, Battle Creek, Detroit and Saginaw, marking the first wave of 13 Veterans Affairs medical centers scheduled for 2026. Veterans Affairs said it hired dozens of staff for the Michigan launch and is filling 400 positions to support the broader push. (news.va.gov) Veterans Affairs’ published schedule shows four Ohio-area sites in June, three Indiana sites in August, and Cleveland plus Anchorage in October. The department says the accelerated plan covers 164 medical centers and associated clinics, with full deployment targeted as soon as 2031. (digital.va.gov) An electronic health record is the software doctors and nurses use to place orders, review labs, write notes and share charts. Veterans Affairs is replacing older local systems with the same platform used by the Defense Department so a service member’s record can move more easily between military and veterans care. (federalnewsnetwork.com) The restart follows a halt that began in April 2023 after outages, usability complaints and patient-safety concerns at the first sites. Veterans Affairs now says it fixed hundreds of problems, standardized the software instead of letting sites customize it heavily, and moved oversight to a single council. (federalnewsnetwork.com) The program remains one of the federal government’s biggest information-technology projects. Veterans Affairs signed the original Cerner contract in 2018 at $10 billion, later revised above $16 billion, and recent estimates reported to lawmakers have put total costs around $37 billion, with some estimates running higher. (nextgov.com) Watchdogs have documented why the rollout stalled. A Government Accountability Office report from March 2025 found only 13% of surveyed users said the system made Veterans Affairs as efficient as possible, while 58% said it increased patient-safety risks. (files.gao.gov) The Department of Veterans Affairs inspector general has also tied the system to serious operational failures. Federal News Network reported in September 2024 that the inspector general counted 826 major performance incidents between October 2020 and March 2024, and earlier watchdog reviews linked system problems to patient harm and one death. (federalnewsnetwork.com) Veterans Affairs leaders say conditions are better now than during the first rollout. Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence told Federal News Network in February that the system was meeting contractual uptime targets and that 10 of the prior 12 months had been incident-free. (federalnewsnetwork.com) That makes the Michigan launch a test of whether more staffing, tighter governance and a market-by-market rollout can keep the system stable as Veterans Affairs moves from 10 live sites toward a nationwide deployment. (federalnewsnetwork.com)