VA Plans to Rollout Its EHR in ‘Waves,’ Program Chief Says

The Department of Veterans Affairs targets a new approach to its electronic health record modernization deployment, moving away from individual site rollouts and instead “implementing waves of medical centers, multiple medical centers at one time, based on the relationships between those medical centers,” Dr. Neil Evans, acting executive program director of VA’s Electronic Health Record Modernization Integration Office, told GovCIO Media & Research in a recent interview.

Implementing the EHR in ‘Waves’

The rollout has been in a reset phase since April 2023, following reports that the system struggled with accuracy, enterprise standardization and reliability of data. Currently, the modern EHR is in place at six sites throughout the VA, with the most recent deployment occurring in March 2024 at the Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago.

The VA announced in Dec. 2024 that it would restart the rollout at four sites in Ann Arbor, Battle Creek, Detroit and Saginaw, with Michigan following in mid-2026. It also announced it will roll out the EHR at nine additional sites spread between Ohio, Indiana and Alaska.

VA plans to use the “wave” deployment approach Evans described when it resumes rollout in Detroit, Ann Arbor, Saginaw and Battle Creek, Michigan in 2026, since the four sites are integrated together and patients often receive specialty care at one facility or primary care at another.

“Going forward, implementing and choosing a schedule that really captures those natural pre-existing relationships, we believe, is an important part of the successful path forward, and that was also partly how we chose the sites that we chose,” Evans said.

VA’s EHR Program Sees Proposed Budget Boost

VA’s dormant but much-anticipated electronic health record modernization program could receive a jolt in funding from the Trump Administration in 2026. The White House’s proposed discretionary budget for FY 2026 calls for an increase of nearly $2.2 billion in funding for the EHR program, saying an accelerated rollout of the program is a “top priority effort.”

The proposed budget also plans to streamline much of the agency’s over 1000 IT systems, which it claims are “decades old” and “duplicative.” It pauses procurement of new systems and directs the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency Service to conduct a full review of the agency’s IT systems alongside the VA.

“There’s testing that we do, where we have to test every build to make sure it’s going to work properly when we go live with it. There’s infrastructure work that we need to do to make sure that our IT networks have been upgraded sufficiently to support the new technologies,” Evans said.

Learning from Federal Partners

As agencies like National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Defense Department and Coast Guard work toward their electronic health record modernization goals, Evans said the VA is learning from their experience and from private sector partners as well.

“We’re not alone in going through an EHR transformation. The scale of what we’re doing in VA is significant, but the experience itself is not entirely unique. We are always open to learning, and have learned quite a bit from our federal partners, and actually from our non federal partners,” Evans said.

Evans emphasized that even after the EHR is rolled out across the country, work will need to be done to continually improve and refine the system to work for both patients and clinicians alike.

“We need to deploy the system, but we need to continue to optimize the system to meet the needs. Technology continues to mature. What we can accomplish using health information technologies is going to continue to improve as new capabilities, artificial intelligence and others, are introduced,” Evans said.