The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs now plans to roll out the federal electronic health record system to 13 medical facilities next year, the agency announced.

Complete deployment of the EHR at all VA medical facilities is now anticipated as early as 2031.

WHY IT MATTERS

The nine additional VA facilities will be announced later in 2025 after the VA Electronic Health Record Modernization Office meets with regional and local VA medical leaders, VA clinicians and EHR vendor Oracle Health.

VA Secretary Doug Collins stressed the need to move faster to integrate veterans' medical records across the VA and Department of Defense in the announcement. 

The VA's EHR modernization project was most recently paused in April 2023, but the agency announced in December that improved veteran trust and clinician satisfaction in the system warranted a restart on deployments at four Michigan VA facilities – Ann Arbor, Battle Creek, Detroit and Saginaw.

"We can and will move faster on this important priority," he said. "But we’re going to listen to our doctors, nurses and vendor partners along the way in order to ensure patient safety, quality and customer service."

By taking a market-based approach to the additional site selections, the VA said it can scale up its number of concurrent deployments.

THE LARGER TREND

Seema Verma, Oracle Health and Oracle Life Sciences executive vice president, told lawmakers last month the company is in the process of migrating the Oracle Health EHR to the cloud.

This move could help enable the department to scale up the number of concurrent deployments, as it promises to, according to her testimony on Feb. 19.

"Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was built with its foundation in scalability and security," she said. "Moving the federal enclave to OCI is underway."

The first phase will be completed later this year, and the company anticipates full migration of the EHR to the cloud to be completed next year, Verma said.

"Oracle has committed to making this move to OCI at our expense."

Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office released a new draft report Feb. 21 that added three new recommendations for cost estimating, schedule and system metrics, bringing its total recommendations to improve the VA's EHR to 18. 

The VA has implemented one recommendation since 2020, the GAO said.

"We have multiple recommendations that VA still needs to implement to improve its [EHR] system."

Though the VA boasted more than 200 days without an outage when it restarted the program in December, the Oracle Health EHR experienced a new widespread outage on March 5 at all six VA medical centers, 26 community clinics and remote VA sites running it.

ON THE RECORD

"America’s veterans deserve a medical records system that’s integrated across all VA and DOD components, and that is exactly what we will deliver," VA Secretary Doug Collins said in a statement. 

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.