The Department of Veterans Affairs is planning to resume its rollout of a new Electronic Health Record in mid-2026, after spending a year and a half to address problems at sites already using it.
The VA announced Friday it would begin EHR pre-deployment activities in the coming weeks, with plans for a mid-2026 launch of the Oracle-Cerner EHR at four VA facilities in Michigan — Ann Arbor, Battle Creek, Detroit and Saginaw.
The VA put all future deployments of its new EHR on hold in April 2023.
The VA’s inspector general office reported in September that between October 2020 and March 2024, the Oracle-Cerner EHR experienced 826 “major performance incidents” — including outages, performance degradations and incomplete functionality.
The VA IG’s office has linked the new EHR’s problems to instances of patient harm. Lawmakers said that, in some cases, those problems contributed to patient deaths.
Department officials say the Oracle-Cerner EHR is running better at the five sites that switched over to the new system, and that the EHR’s launch at a sixth site it jointly operates with the Navy has been its most successful deployment so far.
Deputy VA Secretary Tanya Bradsher said in a statement that the department paused EHR deployments “to listen to veterans and clinicians, understand the issues, and make improvements to the system.”
“As a result of those efforts, veteran trust and system performance have improved across the board. Now, we’re ready to begin planning for new deployments in 2026 — while continuing to improve at all existing sites,”Bradsher said.
Neil Evans, acting program executive director of the EHRM Integration Office, said the VA will begin planning for the next deployments in 2026, “while at the same time remaining committed to the continuous improvement efforts that have been our focus for the past 18 months.”
“We’re going to keep listening to and learning from Veterans and VA staff every step of the way,” Evans said.
The VA said the Oracle-Cerner EHR has seen a “significant decrease” in outages, and that the system has been functioning 100% of the time for 10 of the past 16 months.
In the remaining six months, VA said the EHR saw 99.8% uptime or better. As of early December, the Oracle-Cerner EHR hasn’t experienced an outage in more than 200 days.
The department said clinician and staff satisfaction scores have improved year-over-year improvement since 2022, with more VA health workers agreeing in questionnaires that “the EHR is available when I need it,” and “this EHR enables me to deliver high-quality care.”
The department said VA clinicians are seeing fewer interruptions from the new EHR, and that the average user now sees “near zero interruptions,” such as freezes or lags on a given day.
Kurt DelBene, VA’s assistant secretary for information and technology and the department’s chief information officer, told the House VA Committee’s IT modernization subcommittee last week that the department adopted an “incremental approach” to EHR modernization during the reset period, and that the new approach is working.
“With the pause, we are resetting to getting it right, and in a sense — hindsight is 20/20 — but you probably should have done that from the beginning,” DelBene said. “The scope of the project from the beginning should have been this first pod, and then you would have broadened it beyond that.”
VA Secretary Denis McDonough told reporters last week that the VA’s EHR go-live at the Capt. James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago, which it jointly runs with the Navy, has been a success.
“It’s obviously still too early to declare final or unequivocal success. There have been some promising results. Importantly, I think across each of the EHR systems, we’ve seen increased veteran trust since the EHR go-live,” McDonough said.
McDonough said the Oracle-Cerner EHR has been “dramatically decreasing disruptions in patient care” since January 2024.
“We’re seeing decreasing numbers of interruptions for clinicians, therefore minimizing the slowdowns for veterans,” he said last week.
Incoming political appointees under the Trump administration will decide on some of the next steps for the EHR rollout.
ButMcDonough said career VA employees will continue to oversee most of the day-to-day EHR modernization work, and will brief the Trump transition team on the status of the EHR project.
“The overwhelming majority of VA professionals who work on EHRM will be working on EHRM on January 21st, just as they were on January 19th,” he said. “So that team stays, and we’ve benefited greatly from our opportunity to work with them.”
The VA signed the 10-year, multi-billion-dollar EHR contract with Cerner and started rolling out the system to its medical facilities under the first Trump administration. Oracle completed its acquisition of Cerner in June 2022.
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