Veterans Affairs officials will resume their electronic health record overhaul efforts with four new locations in Michigan in mid-2026, restarting the controversial program about three years after it was halted over patient safety concerns.
Department leaders said they are confident that improvements to the system and to VA processes will yield a better outcome this time, and said the decision to move forward had to be made now to get the infrastructure in place to get the job done to continue next year. .
“We said we would take the time we needed to get everything right, to get to a point where we felt confident that it was time to restart preparations for deployment,” said Dr. Neil Evans, acting program director of VA’s EHRM Integration Office. “We focused on that for more than a year and a half. We see positive results from those efforts.
“Now we are talking about a restart and planning the next deployments.”
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The Health Records Review Project, launched by President Donald Trump in 2017, was intended to bring veterans’ health records into line with military records for the first time.
The project was originally expected to last ten years and cost $16 billion. But nearly eight years later, only six of VA’s more than 170 medical locations use the software.
VA Secretary Denis McDonough announced a complete pause on the rollout in April 2023 after patient safety concerns from researchers and lawmakers about lost or missing files from active patients.
VA has since reviewed these errors and worked with Oracle officials on system improvements, Evans said.
“Patient safety will always be the Veterans Health Administration’s top priority,” he said. “Before we performed the reset, system issues had been identified. Some of these were configuration changes, others were process changes. We have identified and completed a list of items that need to be resolved that could improve or reduce the risk to patient safety.
“We still expect people to voice their concerns because that’s how we find issues that we can address. But overall, we have seen that previous go-lives have led to a decrease in patient safety issues.”
In March, VA administrators at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in Illinois switched completely to the new medical records system. That site is jointly operated by the Department of Defense and VA, providing a unique opportunity to train personnel from both agencies simultaneously.
VA officials have described that rollout as a success, reporting fewer problems and complaints than at previous locations. They also said veterans’ trust scores at the five facilities where the new record system is in use have increased since the dormancy began.
The number of system failures – a common complaint among employees using the system – has also decreased dramatically in recent months. Program officials said it has been more than 200 days since the last outage.
“We paused implementation of the EHR for over a year and a half to listen to veterans and physicians, understand the issues and make improvements to the system,” said VA Assistant Secretary Tanya Bradsher. “As a result of these efforts, veterans’ confidence and system performance has improved across the board.”
Pre-deployment preparations will begin at the Michigan sites in the coming weeks. Whether Trump’s inauguration for his second term will change that schedule is unclear.
Evans said the restart announcement is being made now to prepare the Michigan sites for the upcoming work, including developing staff training plans.
A specific launch date is expected to be announced before early 2026.
