Dive Brief:
- The Department of Veterans Affairs plans to resume its rollout of a new electronic health record system by the end of the 2025 fiscal year, VA Secretary Denis McDonough told lawmakers last week.
- The agency is “committed” to resuming the EHR modernization project, McDonough said during a VA oversight hearing in front of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. “We need a single health record across the VA system, and we need one that talks more effectively to [the Department of Defense],” he said.
- New deployments of the EHR have largely been on hold for about a year as the VA and record vendor Oracle work to improve the system’s reliability and performance.
Dive Insight:
The embattled EHR modernization project has proved a major challenge for the VA and Oracle, as problems with patient safety and technical issues have dogged the years-long implementation.
Cerner, which was later acquired by technology giant Oracle, first notched the contract to update the VA’s EHR in 2018. But only six medical centers have gone live with the new system to date, including a joint VA and DOD facility that launched the new EHR last month.
The VA renegotiated its contract with Oracle last spring, which the agency said would increase its ability to hold the company accountable for outages, responsiveness to clinician requests and interoperability with other systems.
The rollout has also been criticized for patient safety risks. Last month, the VA Office of Inspector General released reports that detailed scheduling and pharmacy problems with the EHR, including an error that may have contributed to a veteran’s death.
Lawmakers have been critical of the rocky deployment. At the budget hearing last week, Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla., noted the VA’s budget request for the EHR modernization project decreased by more than 50% compared with 2024.
“The dramatic budget cut in this program leaves me concerned that there are no real plans to move from reset to implementation,” she said.
The 2025 proposal allocates $894 million for EHR modernization, a decrease of $969 million from this year. It includes $375 million for the EHR contract.
McDonough said the agency has previously appropriated funds that weren’t included in the proposed budget that would be available to the agency when the project exits its reset phase.
“During the course of this year, as we approach the end of the year, I anticipate us being in discussions to get out of reset,” he said. “[...] We have prior-year funding, three-year funding, available to us to deploy in the first instance, beyond the reset.”
