Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

20. Department of Veterans Affairs · Minor

Assess Electronic Health Record transition delays and functionality problems

Partially done

648 20. Department of Veterans Affairs

“Conduct a high-priority assessment of Electronic Health Record (EHR) transition delays and functionality problems. VA innovation in health care for the next 20 years and beyond will rest squarely on the timely implementation of the new VHA EHR in coordination with the DOD's parallel pacing effort.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    VA set out what the review found and what it changed, on the day deployments resumed after a three-year pause: hundreds of problems from the original six-site rollout fixed, local customization replaced by a standardized national system, the competing EHR governance councils replaced by a single council answering to VA leadership, the Deputy Secretary made the accountable official and 400 staff being hired for the rollout. Four Michigan sites went live 2026-04-11, with nine more scheduled in 2026 and full implementation expected as early as 2031. Still partial: VA has published no assessment document, and the Quote’s object is the assessment. Nor has its Inspector General. The VA OIG report index was opened on 2026-09-06 and filtered to its own "Electronic Health Records Modernization (EHRM)" topic: twenty reports carry that topic and exactly two fall inside the window — a management advisory memorandum of 2025-09-03 on documentation deficiencies in electronic health record interface testing at the Lovell Federal Health Care Center (report 24-00682-187, no recommendations, finding that VA and Oracle Health ran the correct tests on all twenty-four interfaces reviewed but documented them inadequately), and a review of 2025-08-07 on facilities’ difficulty retrieving community-care records and importing them into veterans’ electronic health records (24-02154-154, ten recommendations to VHA). Every broader EHRM product — the 2024 audit of major performance incidents, the pharmacy patient-safety inspection, the training-deficiencies inspection, the scheduling advisories, the joint DOD–VA audit — predates the window. Neither in-window report is an assessment of the transition’s delays and functionality problems; both are narrow, site- or process-specific, and the second is about community care rather than the transition.

  2. Partially done

    VA published the full 2026 deployment list for the Federal Electronic Health Record under an accelerated schedule, and said the sites were chosen after planning sessions among the EHR Modernization Integration Office, regional and local medical leaders, clinicians and Oracle Health, with VA adopting “a standard baseline of products, workflows and integrations aligned with subject-matter-expert recommendations” in place of local customization. That is the diagnosis of the transition’s delays and functionality problems being acted on, which is the substance of the Quote; it is not published as an assessment.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Queries and sources, 2026-09-01:

  • news.va.gov press-release searches electronic health record, EHR, health record. The deployment sequence is 2025-03-31 (nine additional 2026 sites), 2026-01-28 ($1bn of the FY26 Non-Recurring Maintenance program for EHR modernization and site preparation), 2026-04-13 (Michigan go-live), 2026-06-08 (Ohio and Kentucky), 2026-08-24 (Indiana).
  • Corpus, every VA Federal Register document since 2025-01-20 read by title — no EHR rule or notice; the program is run administratively.
  • Read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06 — the OIG row is closed and the digital.va.gov row is not.
    • vaoig.gov/reports 404s; vaoig.gov/reports/all is the index, an exposed Drupal view whose filters work: field_report_topic[]=200 is “Electronic Health Records Modernization (EHRM)”, field_report_type[]=106 is “Audit”, field_agency_wide=1, and field_publication_date / field_publication_date_1 take MM/DD/YYYY. The sitewide search at vaoig.gov/search?search= is control-tested — zzqqxnonsense returns “No results” at 1,470 bytes against 5,408 for electronic health record — and it searches report bodies, not only titles. The EHRM topic filter is what settles this item; the searches for EHRM, "Electronic Health Record Modernization" and Federal Electronic Health Record return the same two in-window reports plus information-security inspections at Spokane (2026-02-18) and Southern Oregon (2026-06-25) that were selected because of the EHR launch rather than assessing it.
    • digital.va.gov is genuinely shut, and not by a header wall. Its TLS certificate is issued for station.dev.vaultara.va.gov and does not cover digital.va.gov, so no verified fetch is possible at any rung; forcing past the certificate returns an F5 “Request Rejected” page with a support ID. department.va.gov/electronic-health-record-modernization/ 404s. There is no route to the program page and it stays a lead — belongs in docs/research/residue.md.
Action
other
Object
VHA Electronic Health Record (EHR) transition
ID
1785