As the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) prepares to resume deployments of its Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) program, the VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) is warning of ongoing challenges with the program’s rollout.
In an annual report published on Jan. 22, the VA OIG highlights major management challenges that the VA faced in fiscal year (FY) 2025 and discusses the EHRM program as an ongoing challenge.
“The Electronic Health Record Modernization program experienced major performance incidents – 360 outages, severe degradations, and functionality issues at its first five sites – which contributed to VA’s decision to halt deployment at other planned sites,” the report says.
Notably, the OIG is referring to the VA’s decision in April 2023 to pause all deployments of the new Federal EHR system to address user concerns.
This April, the agency 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.
However, the OIG noted that “additional OIG recommendations that address the process for assessing performance issues remain open.” Specifically, the OIG said that “there remain 32 OIG recommendations that are not fully implemented as VA resumes system deployments.”
“Continued major performance incidents can lead to further costly delays in system implementation and pose an ongoing risk to patient safety,” the report says.
Aside from the OIG, lawmakers have also expressed concern over the VA’s accelerated relaunch of the EHRM program.
The funding package that reopened the federal government in November allocates $3.4 billion to the VA’s EHRM program. However, Congress is withholding 30% of the funding until July 1, 2026, pending the VA’s completion of a series of requirements.
Those requirements include delivering an updated life cycle cost estimate, providing a site-by-site deployment schedule, certifying that the facilities already using the Federal EHR system have met the baseline metrics, and certifying four consecutive incident-free deployments.