VA restarts EHR rollout

Four Veterans Affairs health systems in Michigan switched to the new federal electronic health record on April 12, ending a freeze that had lasted since 2023. The sites are Detroit, Saginaw, Ann Arbor, and Battle Creek, and they are the first new rollouts after three years of delays, outages, and safety reviews. (militarytimes.com) An electronic health record is the software doctors and nurses use as the master file for a patient’s medications, lab results, referrals, and appointments. The Department of Veterans Affairs wants one shared system with the Department of Defense so a service member’s record can follow them from active duty into veteran care without being re-entered by hand. (va.gov) That plan started years ago and then ran into the kind of problem that makes hospitals hit the brakes. The Government Accountability Office said the Department of Veterans Affairs began deployments in 2020, paused them in 2023 after user concerns, and still had about 1,800 complex change requests unresolved as of February 2025. (gao.gov) The worst failures were not abstract software bugs. Military Times reported that the inspector general tied the system to harm involving at least 149 patients, including cases where specialty referrals, follow-up appointments, and lab orders disappeared from view. (militarytimes.com) The money story got worse at the same time. What began as a project expected to take 10 years and cost $10 billion was later revised to $16 billion, and Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence said the current life-cycle figure is $37.2 billion. (militarytimes.com) The Department of Veterans Affairs says the restart is different because it is no longer dropping the software into scattered hospitals one by one. Officials are using a regional rollout, starting with Michigan, then moving to Ohio in June 2026, Indiana in August 2026, and Cleveland plus Alaska in October 2026. (va.gov; federalnewsnetwork.com) That regional approach is supposed to solve a very practical problem. Lawrence said it makes more sense when hospitals in the same area are not using different record systems, because staff, referrals, and patients move across those local networks. (federalnewsnetwork.com) The Department of Veterans Affairs is also betting that the software itself is more stable now than it was during the first wave. Lawrence wrote in March that Oracle Health improved performance, reliability, and usability, and Military Times reported his claim that the system ran without outages 87 percent of the time from June 2023 through December 2025. (militarytimes.com) Even with the restart, most of the system is still old. The Government Accountability Office said that with the first four new locations coming online, about 160 medical centers, or 94 percent of the Department of Veterans Affairs total, would still be outside the new system as of mid-2026. (gao.gov) The Department of Veterans Affairs now says 13 medical centers will go live in 2026 and all medical centers could be converted as early as 2031. After a project that stalled for three years and ballooned in cost, the next clue will not be a press release but whether Michigan stays quiet once veterans start showing up for routine appointments, prescriptions, and lab work this month. (va.gov; militarytimes.com)