The Department of Veterans Affairs is continuing its rollout of a new, multi-billion-dollar Electronic Health Record at its healthcare facilities after ending a three-year pause in deployments.
Last Saturday, VA deployed its new EHR to four more sites in Ohio and Kentucky — the Cincinnati VA Medical Center, Chillicothe VA Medical Center, Dayton VA Medical Center and the Cincinnati VA Medical Center-Fort Thomas.
This marks the second wave of EHR go-lives under the second Trump administration. The VA said in a press release that with the latest go-lives, an additional 7,200 VA employees and 107,000 veterans have migrated to the new EHR.
In April, the VA deployed the new EHR to four medical facilities in Michigan — ending a “reset” period that began in April 2023 to address persistent outages and functionality problems reported by VA medical staff already using the new EHR.
The VA is scheduled to deploy the Oracle-Cerner EHR to three sites in Indiana this August. In October, the system will go live at VA medical centers in Cleveland, Ohio and Anchorage, Alaska.
Top Democrats on several Senate committees recently praised the VA for resuming EHR rollouts. Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.), however, pressed the VA to address issues at earlier sites, including Spokane, Washington and Walla Walla, Washington.
Neil Evans, the acting program executive director of VA’s Electronic Health Record Modernization Integration Office, said last month that the new EHR supports 22,000 VA clinicians and 400,000 veterans. Evans delivered these remarks after VA’s EHR go-lives in Michigan, but before its most recent rollout in Ohio and Kentucky.
Evans, speaking on a May 5 panel about the state of the federal EHR, said that the VA has “continued to commit to improvements based on feedback we’ve heard from our end users.”
“This is not a set of technologies that we deploy and forget about. This is a set of technologies that we need to continue to optimize in perpetuity,” he said.
VA Secretary Doug Collins told lawmakers in a hearing last month that 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, he added, has now standardized the EHR deployment process.
Groups representing VA employees told Democrats on the Senate VA Committee that the EHR is still running into some problems. But a VA spokesman said many of their claims are inaccurate.
VA Press Secretary Quinn Slaven said VA implemented nearly 1,500 enhancements, bug fixes, and new functionalities so far under the second Trump administration — and that the new EHR has been free of any system-wide outages for 10 of the past 12 months. Over the past 18 months, the new EHR has been running incident-free for 96.68% of the time, exceeding contractual uptime requirements.
Jacob Pannell, a business representative for the National Federation of Federal Employees, said VA medical facilities in Maryland that still use the department’s legacy EHR system don’t have full visibility into his medical records from when he was a patient and provider at facilities in Washington State using the new EHR.
Julie McLendon, legislative committee co-chairwoman of the Nurses Organization of Veterans Affairs, said the VA facilities that have switched over to the Oracle-Cerner EHR are experiencing problems migrating inter-facility consults, referrals and orders
VA’s new EHR is currently running at 14 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.
The department says the new EHR will allow seamless transfers of military health records between the DoD and VA, as well as integrate veterans’ health information from private-sector health care facilities.
Under the Biden and first Trump administrations, government watchdogs flagged several problems with the new EHR. In some cases, the new EHR did not successfully transfer prescription orders to VA’s pharmacy operations, as well as flags in veterans’ medical files indicating that they were at an elevated risk of suicide.
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.
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 week, the Senate VA Committee held a confirmation hearing for Gary Shatswell, President Donald Trump’s third pick to serve as the department chief information officer and associate secretary for IT, and Michael Tierney, Trump’s pick to lead the VA’s Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection.
Neither Shatswell nor Tierney would work directly on the VA EHR rollout, but committee Chairman Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) told them that “there are important issues that come with your positions.”
“That’s particularly true when there’s the timing of the rollout of new Electronic Health Records. It’s back on track after a lengthy pause,” Moran said.
If confirmed, Shatswell said would help the VA consolidate an “unacceptable” sprawl of 14 different scheduling systems.
“The root of the issue is that there isn’t one system. There are systems and there are many, and they don’t talk to each other. So there is a lot of work to build those bridges and to make the data flow,” he said.
Tierney said the Trump administration’s rollout of a standardized nondisclosure agreement for all federal employees would not have a chilling effect on whistleblowers coming forward.
“I will 100% say that NDAs and whistleblower activity have no role together. Employees must feel 100% comfortable that they are not going to be restricted in reporting on bad conduct,” Tierney said.
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