The Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Dayton, Ohio, is working on endpoints, switches, fiber runs and more as it prepares for a switchover to Oracle Health as one of the planned rollouts of the VA's electronic health record modernization program.

WHY IT MATTERS

The Dayton VA Medical Center is in the midst of an IT infrastructure upgrade that will make way for the new EHR, Jennifer DeFrancesco, the medical center's director, told Dayton Daily News.

The $55.6 million information technology infrastructure upgrade awarded last year includes upgrades to the center's IT closets, infrastructure and equipment. 

With these technology improvements, the VA aims to ensure that the facility has the backbone infrastructure it needs to operate with the Oracle Health EHR system – free of delays, slowness or "latency" issues, DeFrancesco said Wednesday.

The new Oracle EHR will enable VA physicians and nurses to have a "more complete story of a veteran’s health" from the time of military enlistment, she added.

The completion of the EHR rollout is expected in mid-2026.

THE LARGER TREND

System slowdowns reported by the Mann Grandstaff Medical Center in Spokane, Washington, in 2023 were just one of the reasons Rep. Mike Bost, R-Illinois., and other lawmakers sought to put a stop to the VA's EHR modernization and stick with its old VistA EHR two years ago.

At the time of the outage in Spokane, the Department of Defense was making updates to its Oracle EHR – Genesis – which shares a database with the VA, Terrence Hayes, who was then press secretary for the VA, said in a local news report.

Meanwhile, in September, the VA Office of Inspector General released an audit indicating that it still needed to strengthen controls addressing EHR performance, including how it prioritizes incidents. 

OIG said that the VA lacked well-defined, consistent standards in its guidance for timely response and had not imposed clear standards on Oracle Health.

Then, in March, the VA, along with other agencies using federal EHRs, experienced another system outage. 

Expressing excitement about the progress of Oracle's VA EHR modernization at the HIMSS25 conference and exhibition, Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, said that the cause of the outage days before was a management issue, not a challenge in platform usage.

ON THE RECORD

"For veterans, it should be a seamless transition," DeFrancesco said.

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