On schedule, the VA’s EHR Modernization resumes after a three-year-plus hiatus. The four VA Medical Centers (VAMCs) announcing their go-lives over this past weekend are all in Michigan’s VISN 10: Ann Arbor, Battle Creek, Detroit and Saginaw. Four more are planned for June, also in VISN 10 (a VISN is a VA region): Dayton Ohio, Chillicothe Ohio, Cincinnati, and Cincinnati-Fort Thomas Kentucky, then three more in August and two more in October. Based on the schedule, calendar 2026 will have a total of 13 system rollouts, all in VISN 10 except for the last in October, which will include VISN 20’s Anchorage, Alaska VA Health System. [TTA 8 Feb]

The only exception to the hiatus was a joint Military Health System/VA implementation at Lovell in Chicago, which has had its own bumps after its start in March 2024. VA previously had five disastrous implementations, VA Mann-Grandstaff (VISN 20) in October 2020 and four more in 2022. After many actions to fix them, the VA halted implementations in April 2023. Even in 2025, in its agency report, the VA’s Office of Inspector General in their March 2025 report, and their January 2026 report on VA’s Management and Performance Challenges for FY 2025 found a distinct lack of VA staff confidence in the EHRM and its performance to date [TTA 8 Feb].

Strategically, confining the rollouts to one VISN and a small group at a time is smart because of the geographical adjacency and not scattering efforts all over the US. After these 13 however, there are 157 more. VA has pegged a full completion by 2031.

In its press release announcing the April go-lives, the VA identified four factors that got the EHRM off the dime. FTR: 

• Fixing hundreds of problems related to the initial rollout of the EHR system at the six original VA sites. Some of these related to efforts by local VA facilities to customize the system, which only complicated the process.
• Eliminating the bureaucracy that was holding the project back. VA replaced that unwieldy system with a single council that answers to top VA leaders, increasing accountability and making it easier to find and implement common sense decisions.
• Getting local facilities more involved. As VA’s lead official on the EHR rollout, VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence has visited all 13 deployment sites this year and has engaged directly with facility leaders at each location to answer questions and make sure these sites are ready to go.
• Hiring more people to ensure the rollout goes smoothly. VA has already hired dozens of staff to help with the rollout in Michigan and other locations and is in the process of hiring a total of 400 people.

Last year, VA terminated contracts for at least six independent contractors supporting the EHRM as part of a mass cleanup of department contracts. FNN

Federal News Network, Healthcare Dive

There is nothing in the release, of course, about Oracle Health’s manpower cuts, rumored to be 30%, nor the persistent talk that the EHR unit will be sold or spun off. Or the effects that the recent indictment of a former EHRM head will have in Congress. In this Editor’s view, Oracle’s corporate redirection to and big bet on AI datacenters strongly suggests that Oracle will not be engaged with this deployment by the time 2031 rolls around.