The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on Monday released the names of the nine additional medical facilities where the Federal Electronic Health Record system will be deployed next year.
EHR will go live at four sites in Ohio - Chillicothe VAMC, Cincinnati VAMC, Dayton VAMC, Louis Stokes and Cleveland VAMC; and at Fort Wayne VAMC, Marion VAMC and Richard L. Roudebush VAMC in Indiana.
The system will also go live at Fort Thomas in Kentucky and at the Alaska VA Healthcare System, according to a VA release.
The sites were chosen following planning sessions among officials from VA’s Electronic Health Record Modernization Integration Office, regional and local VA medical leaders, VA clinicians and EHR vendor Oracle Health.
“We are excited to bring veterans in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Alaska a modern medical record system that will result in improvements to care, coordination and convenience,” said VA Secretary Doug Collins.
The Federal EHR system’s goal is to connect the VA, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Coast Guard and other federal partners so that clinicians can easily access a veteran’s full medical history in one location
“The Federal EHR is integrated across all VA and Department of Defense components, enabling seamless data exchange while enhancing care, safety and customer service for patients,” said Collins.
Cerner, then Oracle Health, and VA contracted in 2018 to integrate the Department of Defense’s health records system with VA’s. The effort to integrate the systems has faced several hurdles along the way to full implementation, including outages, issues with patient scheduling and prescription management. According to a review by the VA Office of Inspector General, 149 patients were impacted by issues related to the rollout at one facility.
The integration was paused in 2023 to allow for upgrades. In December of 2024, VA announced that four of its sites in Michigan — VA Battle Creek Medical Center, VA Detroit Healthcare System, VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, and VA Saginaw Healthcare System — would go live with the EHR in 2026.
VA said it is pursuing a market-based approach to site selection for its deployments, which will enable it to scale up the number of concurrent deployments while also allowing staff to work as efficiently as possible.
VA will also adopt a standardized national baseline of products, workflows and integrations aligned with subject-matter-expert recommendations to ensure successful Federal EHR implementation, accelerate deployments, simplify decision-making and support future optimizations, it said.
Full implementation of the Federal EHR system at every VA facility is expected as early as 2031. For more information about VA’s overall EHR modernization effort, see here.
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvetts.com.