Dive Brief:
The Department of Veterans Affairs is taking steps to resume deployments of an Oracle electronic health record after largely pausing the rollout for more than a year.
The VA will roll out the record to four facilities in Michigan — VA Battle Creek Medical Center, VA Detroit Healthcare System, VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and VA Saginaw Healthcare System — in mid-2026, the agency said.
New deployments have mostly been paused since April 2023 to focus on system improvements after reports of patient safety and technical issues. The VA plans to kick off pre-deployment work for the Michigan facilities in the coming weeks, the agency said in a Dec. 20 news release.
Dive Insight:
EHR vendor Cerner — later acquired by technology giant Oracle — originally scored the contract to replace the VA’s legacy medical record in 2018.
But only six medical centers have gone live with the new EHR to date, as the modernization project has faced growing costs, technical issues and errors that have been linked to patient harm.
The VA largely paused the rollout a year and a half ago to prioritize system improvements at medical centers currently using the new record, with the exception of a new deployment last spring at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago, Illinois.
During the pause, the agency negotiated a new contract with Oracle that it says increases its ability to hold the company accountable for outages, responsiveness to clinician requests and interoperability with other health systems and applications.
The hold on new deployments has been helpful at driving system improvements, VA officials say. The EHR has functioned 100% of the time in 10 of the last 16 months, and it has been more than 200 days since the last EHR outage as of early December, according to the agency.
VA leaders have said the agency is “committed” to the modernization project, estimating the pause would come to an end soon. In April, VA Secretary Denis McDonough told lawmakers the agency planned to resume its rollout by the end of the 2025 fiscal year.
But lawmakers have raised concerns about resuming deployments. Though VA and Oracle officials said the rollout at Lovell went well, some legislators argued in a July hearing the go-live used more resources and staff than would be available at future facilities.
