Dive Brief:
- The Department of Veterans Affairs deployed the Oracle electronic health record to three VA hospitals in Indiana on Saturday, marking the third round of rollouts this year.
- Oracle’s EHR is now at the Northern Indiana Health Care System’s hospitals in Fort Wayne and Marion, and the Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center in Indianapolis, as well as 16 clinics associated with the medical centers, the VA said in a Monday press release.
- The EHR system has now been deployed at 11 hospitals this year, most recently at four medical centers in Ohio and Kentucky in June and four in Michigan in April. The latest rollout in Indiana gets the VA one step closer to its goal of deploying the federal EHR at 13 sites this year.
Dive Insight:
The new stream of deployments follow a three-year pause in EHR implementation at the VA resulting from ongoing technical errors, patient safety concerns and mounting costs associated with the upgrades.
EHR vendor Cerner, which was later acquired by Oracle, won a 10-year contract to replace the VA’s records system in 2018 — the old one was outdated, expensive and difficult to maintain, according to the VA. But by 2020, just six VA medical centers out of 170 had debuted the Oracle EHR, and those six organizations experienced major performance issues with the system.
In 2023, the VA largely paused the EHR deployments to negotiate its contract with Oracle and address the performance issues, which included technical glitches and outages.
The Trump administration resumed the project with its first round of deployments in April. It says the new system will enable the seamless transfer of military health records among federal departments, improve continuity of care for veterans and ease technology woes, according to the press release.
The VA said that its deputy secretary, Paul Lawrence, has visited all 13 deployment sites planned for this year in an effort to answer questions from facility leaders and ensure the rollouts go smoothly. The VA said it has "already hired dozens of staff, with plans for more,” to facilitate the accelerated deployment.
Lawrence said that the administration is committed to ensuring that every VA medical facility has the new EHR by 2031.
Cost estimates for the project remain uncertain, ranging from $16.1 billion to nearly $50 billion, a federal watchdog says. The VA is seeking $4.2 billion in discretionary funding in its 2027 budget to support the project, $840 million more than what it received last year.
The final EHR implementations in 2026 are scheduled for October at Alaska VA Healthcare System and Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center in Ohio.
