Dive Brief:
- The Department of Veterans Affairs deployed the Oracle electronic health record to four medical centers in Ohio and Kentucky on Saturday, marking the second round of rollouts this year.
- The EHR was launched at Cincinnati VA Medical Center, Chillicothe VA Medical Center, Dayton VA Medical Center and the Cincinnati VA Medical Center-Fort Thomas to more than 7,200 clinicians and staff, the VA said in a Monday press release.
- The rollout comes two months after four medical centers in Michigan also received the new software. They were the first VA facilities in years to deploy the Oracle EHR after the embattled project was paused to improve the system and fix technical errors.
Dive Insight:
With the rollout of the new EHR in Kentucky and Ohio, the VA has completed eight of its planned 13 deployments this year.
The Trump administration has been accelerating the distribution of the records system, which it says will ease the exchange of military health records, improve continuity of care for veterans and lessen the amount of time providers spend struggling with aging technology.
However, the project has proved a major challenge for the VA. EHR vendor Cerner — later acquired by Oracle — signed the contract to replace the department’s old EHR in 2018. But system reliability issues, patient safety risks and rising costs bedeviled the rollout, leading the VA to largely pause new deployments in 2023.
In late 2024, the department said it would begin new deployments again in 2026. At that point, only six VA medical centers out of 170 had rolled out the Oracle EHR.
Now, the VA has completed its second wave of rollouts this year. The department said it has fixed “hundreds of problems” at the six original sites and plans to hire 400 staffers to assist with the deployments. Feedback from clinicians and leadership at the Michigan medical centers has been “exceptionally positive,” the VA said.
The department plans to next roll out the new records system to three medical centers in Indiana in August. In October, the Alaska VA Healthcare System and the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center will receive the EHR.
