VA hopes to use next year’s EHR rollouts to gain momentum for faster deployments

Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins told lawmakers on Thursday that he is hopeful the department’s successful deployment of its new Oracle electronic health record system at 13 VA medical facilities in 2026 will quickly accelerate site rollouts of the software.

In separate budget hearings before the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee and a House Appropriations subcommittee, Collins reiterated that VA is streamlining communication between key department officials and Oracle personnel to help ensure the department’s EHR modernization project can emerge from an operational pause on most rollouts that was instituted in April 2023.

VA initially signed a $10 billion contract — which was later revised to over $16 billion — with Cerner in May 2018 to modernize its legacy health record system and make it interoperable with the Pentagon’s new health record, which was also provided by Cerner. Oracle later acquired Cerner in 2022.

Issues with the VA’s new system, however, cropped up almost as soon as it was first deployed in 2020 at the Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center in Spokane, Washington. Patient safety concerns, technical glitches and usability challenges plagued the software, and VA ultimately decided to freeze implementation at most new facilities until it could address problems at the sites where the software had been deployed. As of this month, the new EHR system has been implemented at just six of the department’s 170 medical centers.

VA announced in December that it was moving out of its operational pause and planned to roll out the new system at four Michigan-based medical sites in mid-2026. Collins subsequently announced in March that the department was planning to deploy the software at nine additional medical facilities next year, bringing the total to 13 sites.

Collins told lawmakers that the modernization project was “a cold fish” when he took over as secretary, with one of his initial goals being to whittle down the number of internal department committees involved with the project so that VA had one group engaging with Oracle about it. 

“There's been no momentum in this project,” Collins said. “Once you get momentum, you can add more sites as you go.”

He said VA’s plan to deploy the new system at 13 medical sites in 2026 will ideally pave the way to faster site rollouts moving forward, adding that “probably the addition of 20 to 25 more [medical facilities] is our goal or target” in fiscal year 2027.

The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal, which was released on May 2, included a roughly $2.2 billion boost for the deployment of the new EHR system.

Part of this accelerated timeline, Collins said, is also a result of the department’s push to address standardization issues with the system across VA’s network of medical facilities. The six sites where the software had been deployed were all doing different things — an untenable process that Collins said conflicts with “what every other hospital in the world does.” He estimated that “we have about 10% that is unique to VA, and we're going to work through those again as we go forward.”

Additional stumbling blocks in previous EHR deployments — such as insufficient end-user training — also remain a focus of Collins’ plan to speed up deployments. Watchdogs and lawmakers alike have cited poor and confusing education programs about using the new software as a specific issue with previous rollouts. Collins said VA is working on its side “to make sure that all of our employees are trained” during what he called “a very short timeframe.”

“Everybody's going to be up to speed, and we're speeding up that integration process,” Collins said. “We're also holding Oracle accountable for realistic time limits, and also bringing the equipment in and also adding things such as AI.”

The Department of Defense faced similar challenges in the early stages of its own deployment of a new EHR system that began in 2017, which was also provided by Cerner and then Oracle. VA’s new EHR system is meant to be interoperable with the DOD software. 

“They had a pause, and they actually came out of the pause and were standardized and got it done,” Collins said. DOD completed global rollouts of its EHR system last year.