The Department of Veterans Affairs is moving ahead with the rollout of a new, multi-billion-dollar Electronic Health Record at its health care facilities, after a three-year pause to address longstanding issues with the system.

Over the weekend, the VA rolled out the Oracle-Cerner system to four VA health care systems in Michigan ― Ann Arbor, Battle Creek, Detroit and Saginaw.

This is the first wave of EHR deployments the VA has planned for this year under an accelerated schedule. Unlike previous deployments, which occurred one site at a time, the EHR go-lives in Michigan all took place on the same day.

VA’s new EHR is currently running at 10 sites. Full deployment would bring the EHR to 170 sites. The department currently expects to complete the deployment as soon as 2031. The Defense Department completed its transition to the same EHR platform in March 2024.

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VA’s EHR modernization project is one of the largest IT contracts in the federal government. The project stalled under multiple administrations and ballooned well beyond its initial $10 billion estimate. Cost estimates for VA’s EHR modernization range from $16.1 billion to nearly $50 billion.

The VA has been in a “reset” period since April 2023, which paused new go-lives until the department addresses persistent outages and usability issues reported by VA medical staff already using the new EHR.

The department said it’s now fixed “hundreds of problems” related to the initial rollout of the EHR system at its original six sites.

VA’s inspector general office reported in September 2024 that the new EHR has had more than 800 major performance incidents since its launch. More than half of those incidents happened after the 2023 pause on new deployments.

A Government Accountability Office report in March 2025  found that only 13% of VA staff using the new Oracle-Cerner EHR believed the modernized system made VA as efficient as possible, and 58% of users believed the new system increased patient safety risks.

Deputy VA Secretary Paul Lawrence, the department’s lead official on the EHR modernization project, told Federal News Network in an interview in February that the EHR is now meeting uptime targets defined in its contract with the vendor, and that 10 of the past 12 months have been “incident-free.”

“We tell everybody the system is reliable,” Lawrence said.

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Lawrence said in a statement on Monday that the deployments in Michigan “represent real progress toward a unified electronic health record that strengthens care delivery for our patients and providers.”

In June, the VA will deploy the Oracle-Cerner EHR to three VA medical centers in Ohio and one in Kentucky.

In August, the new system will go live at three VA medical centers in Indiana. By October, the new EHR will be live at the VA medical center in Anchorage, Alaska and Cleveland, Ohio.

The VA said in a press release that the Oracle-Cerner EHR will ensure doctors and nurses spend more time with veterans during medical appointments, and “less time struggling with outdated technology.”

The department says the new EHR will also enable seamless transfers of military health records between the DoD and VA, as well as integrate veterans’ health information from private-sector health care facilities.

The VA said it hired dozens of staff to help with the latest phase of the EHR rollout, and is in the process of hiring a total of 400 employees.

VA’s EHR Modernization lost some of its staffing in the early days of the second Trump administration. Department officials told House lawmakers in February 2025 that the EHR office fired about eight employees, as part of a governmentwide push to terminate probationary staff. Another 16 employees in the EHR office accepted a governmentwide deferred resignation offer.

Last year, VA’s EHR office had about 250 employees, but was funded to have up to 330 total full-time staff.

The department also cut ties with several companies providing EHR support work last year, as part of a mass cancellation of contracts.

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The first Trump administration awarded the EHR contract to Cerner in May 2018, and began deployments a few months later. Cerner was acquired by Oracle in June 2022.

In a hearing in January , VA Secretary Doug Collins told members of the Senate VA Committee that the EHR rollout under the Biden administration was an “unmitigated disaster.”

“The previous administration just frankly gave up, threw their hands up in the air and said, ‘We quit,’ after billions of dollars being spent,” he said.

Collins said one of the key issues with previous go-lives was that the VA allowed too much customization in how local facilities implemented the new EHR. The department said it has standardized the EHR deployment process.

“Saturday’s rollout focuses on a standardized system that will put all VA facilities on the same page and remove the complexities that caused delays,” the VA wrote in a press release.

The VA says it’s also eliminated layers of bureaucracy that were holding the project back. The department said that under the Biden Administration, EHR modernization decisions “were left to several councils that fought among themselves and held up key decisions.”

“VA replaced that unwieldy system with a single council that answers to top VA leaders, increasing accountability and making it easier to find and implement common-sense decisions,” the department wrote.

The Trump administration is looking to give the VA $4.2 billion in discretionary funding for the ongoing EHR rollout in its fiscal 2027 budget request — an increase of about $800 million.

Last month, the Justice Department charged a former VA EHR executive with concealing thousands of dollars in cash and gifts he allegedly received from government contractors. Top Republicans on the House and Senate VA Committees said they would be monitoring any potential impacts these charges would have on the continued EHR rollout.

If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email jheckman@federalnewsnetwork.com, or reach out on Signal at jheckman.29

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