The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is preparing to resume its deployments of the Federal Electronic Health Record (EHR) to 13 sites in fiscal year (FY) 2026, and this time, the agency is planning to move away from individual site rollouts.
Instead, the agency will deploy the EHR in waves to multiple sites at a time, according to Dr. Neil Evans, the acting program executive director of the VA’s Electronic Health Record Modernization Integration Office.
“When we go live in a local market, and there’s a period of time where a medical center that collaborates very closely with its neighboring medical center are on two different electronic health records, it introduces all kinds of complexity,” Evans said on Sept. 23 at GovCIO’s Health IT Summit.
Evans explained that the VA shares “a ton of resources between sites,” including telehealth providers and shared services through the VA’s TeleCritical Care Program.
When one site has a different EHR, Evans said this introduces complexity with regard to training, as well as technical interfaces that have to be implemented to “just to stitch things together” during the transition period.
“So, by going live all at once as a cohort, we allow ourselves to build a sense of community around this deployment cycle and help eliminate some of that sort of transitional stress where we’re [going to] have people in sort of phased fashions on different go-lives,” Evans said.
The program chief said the goal is to drive faster implementations, delivering the Federal EHR to each market on time.
“As we work through our schedule, we’re going to be going live with three to six medical centers per wave based on their market alignment,” Evans said.
“We are in the midst of a really significant acceleration with deployment,” he added. “The plan is to finish deployment across the enterprise by 2031, so it’s a really significant uptick.”
The new deployment plans come after the VA has spent over two years in “reset” mode for its Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) program. As part of the EHRM program reset, the VA and contractor Oracle Health – formerly Oracle Cerner – paused all deployments to address user concerns.
Thus far, the VA has deployed the new EHR system to six out of the 164 VA medical centers. Aside from the 13 planned deployments in 2026, the VA has not yet released a schedule for the remaining 145 sites.