The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced Thursday that it redesigned a key clinical assessment form in its Federal Electronic Health Record (EHR) after front-line clinicians flagged inefficiencies that slowed care and increased the risk of documentation errors.
The update centers on the Military Environmental Exposure Assessment (MEEA) PowerForm, which VA clinicians use to document veterans’ exposure to burn pits, toxic chemicals, and other environmental hazards linked to military service.
According to a Jan. 15 press release, VA clinicians noticed the MEEA PowerForm was taking significantly longer to complete in the Federal EHR than in the department’s legacy Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) platform.
For instance, key clinical information was not auto-populating within the form, leaving clinicians to copy and paste information from multiple sources. This workaround led to inefficiency and potential for clinical error, according to the VA.
Three groups collaborated on the redesign: Veterans Exposure Team – Health Outcomes Military Exposures (VET-HOME), the Office of Clinical Informatics and Human Systems Integration, and the Electronic Health Record Modernization Integration Office’s Ambulatory Care Solution Management team.
“They rebuilt the MEEA PowerForm template to include all relevant clinical fields in a single location,” the VA said. “The redesigned PowerForm streamlines end-user interaction and ensures that all relevant clinical data is consolidated in one note.”
Additionally, the new form includes a military history section, allowing clinicians to see a veteran’s military service and deployment history right in the Federal EHR. This feature is unique to the Federal EHR and was not available in VistA.
The VA noted that the new form also helps to support data-driven research. The structured data supports studies on military environmental exposures and related health conditions, according to the VA.
The teams completely revamped the form in eight weeks, and early feedback from users indicates faster and more complete documentation.
“The new template is a dramatic improvement over the prior [Federal EHR] note template in that all the information you need is automatically embedded,” said Dr. Donna Coffman, a physician with VET-HOME. “I love the new feature to add the military dates.”
Dr. Coffman added that the new version “is even easier to use” than the VistA version because she doesn’t have to look for information on old test results or reenter information such as family history.
“This effort is a great example of meeting both the challenge and the opportunity for standardization that EHRM represents for VA,” said Dr. Edward Post, co-chair of the Veterans Health Administration Ambulatory Tier 1 Subject Matter Expert Team.
“Our partners in VET-HOME brought their vision of ‘what’ was needed (a more efficient way of getting their clinical work done) and collaborated with the project solution team who brought the ‘how’ of the Federal EHR system,” he said.
The MEEA upgrade lands as the VA prepares to resume its Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) program deployments this year.
The EHRM program aims to provide a seamless experience for veterans as they transition from receiving care under the Department of Defense to receiving care under the VA, with a single, fully integrated EHR system.
However, the department has spent almost three years in “reset” mode for its EHRM program. As part of that reset, the VA and contractor Oracle Health – formerly Oracle Cerner – paused all deployments in April 2023 to address user concerns.
Thus far, the VA has deployed the new Federal EHR system to six out of the 164 VA medical centers.
The agency now plans to resume its deployments of the Federal EHR to 13 sites in fiscal year 2026, beginning in April with four Michigan facilities: Ann Arbor, Battle Creek, Detroit, and Saginaw. Later in 2026, it plans to deploy the system to nine additional medical facilities with sites located in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Alaska.
Beyond these 13 planned deployments, the VA has not released a schedule for the remaining 145 sites.