VA Plans ‘Run to the Finish Line’ for 2031 EHR Deployment

The Department of Veterans Affairs is learning from the War Department’s “run to the finish line” deployment of its electronic health record as it prepares for 13 additional go-live sites in 2026, Dr. Neil Evans, acting program executive director of VA’s Electronic Health Record Modernization Integration Office, said Tuesday at the Health IT Summit.

“[DOW] has fully deployed, Coast Guard has fully deployed, NOAA has fully deployed, VA has not. … We are in the midst of a really significant acceleration with deployment,” Evans said. “What did [DOW] learn after their original pause before they had the run to the finish line with regard to deployment? And what can we in VA learn to allow us to do this in a way that is better standardized across the enterprise and allows us to move faster?”

VA has earlier said it would pursue a “waved deployment” strategy that uses existing medical facility relationships and that emphasizes interoperability, with the goal of reaching full enterprise deployment by 2031.

Under the wave model, VA will activate three to six medical centers at a time based on market alignment. Deploying as a cohort reduces transition stress and helps facilities move faster together, Evans explained.

“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 with regard to training … with regard to technical interfaces … during this period of transition. And so, there’s a real opportunity, we realize, to say, ‘Let’s start to think more in a market-based fashion,'” Evans said.

VA’s upcoming go-live plans come nearly three years since the program was paused in 2023. The agency will go live at four Michigan sites on April 11, bringing the total to 19 medical centers and community care clinics by the end of 2026.

Automation in MHS Genesis

Since the War Department fully deployed its EHR — MHS Genesis — in March 2024, officials are further refining the end user experience. Defense Health Agency MHS Genesis Functional Champion Rear Adm. Tracy Farrill called out ambient listening and automating coding as potential solutions.

“I’m really excited that by the first of the year we’ll be able to deploy [ambient listening] to our clinicians,” Farrill said. “How do we integrate that technology and how do we keep pace with that technology. We can do more, we can do better, we can move faster. … So that’s our major milestone is really improving the end user experience with automation.”

Farrill referred to the agency’s upcoming AI governance strategy that reviews, prioritizes and modernizes in a more “strategic and disciplined” way to enable federal partners to benefit from emerging tech integration.

“We have established a fairly new office with a digital integration and a governance process that brings in the relevant leaders within the organization, so that they’re part of the decision-making process, and the resourcing decisions are transparent across the organization. So, we’re fairly new in that, but it’s developing and really maturing into something we can depend on, and it’s replicable for any IT solutions we’re exploring,” Farrill said.

The White House has emphasized the importance of industry partnerships in modernizing federal health care delivery. Key to the development of these solutions will be interoperability with the federal EHR.

“Integrating and collaborating with the agencies so that one, we’re helping them to not only launch and deploy and support, but we’re also not trying to bolt on technologies that later on become, you know, problems in terms of interoperability,” said Richard Persinger, general manager at HP.