Dive Brief:
- The Department of Veterans Affairs has selected Amwell to facilitate telehealth delivery across the agency.
- Amwell’s platform, which mainly offers virtual health visits, will help veterans connect with VA providers or other specialists in clinic. It will also support other telehealth services, such as virtual care delivery and care coordination within VA hospitals.
- The VA signed a letter of intent to implement Amwell’s platform. A binding contract will depend on Amwell satisfying federal requirements, including a review by the VA's chief information officer.
Dive Insight:
Virtual care is popular among veterans, with one VA estimate showing that more than 2.9 million veterans participated in telehealth visits in fiscal year 2025, a 10% jump from the year prior.
The VA said it selected Amwell following an evaluation of the company’s interoperability capabilities as well as its cybersecurity compliance.
Amwell has worked with the federal government before. In 2023, the Department of Defense picked Amwell and technology company Leidos to digitize care delivery at the Military Health System in a deal worth up to $180 million.
The agency has since replaced the Military Health System's Video Connect solution with Amwell's virtual health platform, which is integrated into the health system's EHR. The contract was extended in August 2025.
The project is part of the VA's ongoing and beleaguered electronic health record modernization project. The agency’s quest to update its health records system, which was initially launched in 2018 with Cerner before it was acquired by Oracle, has faced significant delays and mounting costs.
Only six VA medical centers out of 170 had implemented the new EHR by 2020 as outages and other challenges plagued the rollout. Last week, lawmakers voted to subpoena two Oracle leaders over the project's ballooning costs after the agency agreed to raise Oracle's contract ceiling to $27 billion.
