With the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) preparing to restart deployments of its Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) program in April, a senior federal health IT leader said Thursday that the effort is entering a new phase shaped by hard lessons learned and growing confidence in the underlying system.
Lance Scott, chief technology officer (CTO) at the Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization (FEHRM) office, expressed optimism this week about the restart while speaking at GDIT’s Emerge: Modern Government event in Washington.
“VA is getting ready to restart its fielding again. It’s very different from the very beginning,” Scott said. “When we first started, our first one to four sites … they were thrown into the meat grinder … It was tough. We had a very steep learning curve at the time.”
“We had a lot of resistance at the beginning. But, hands down, there isn’t a single system out there that would have it replaced today. [VA employees] absolutely love the way it is,” he said.
VA’s EHRM program – which has faced scrutiny from lawmakers over cost estimates and deployment readiness ahead of the April restart – is expected to accelerate in 2026.
The agency has spent over two and a half years in “reset” mode for the program. As part of that reset, the VA and contractor Oracle Health – formerly Oracle Cerner – paused all deployments in April 2023 to address user concerns.
Thus far, the VA has deployed the new EHR system to six out of the 164 VA medical centers.
The agency now plans to resume deployments to 13 sites in fiscal year 2026, beginning in April with four Michigan facilities: Ann Arbor, Battle Creek, Detroit, and Saginaw. Later in 2026, it plans to deploy the system to nine additional medical facilities with sites located in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Alaska.
The EHRM program aims to provide a seamless experience for veterans as they transition from receiving care under the Department of Defense (DOD) to receiving care under the VA, with a single, fully integrated EHR system.
The DOD – which the Trump administration has rebranded to the Department of War – has already completed its deployment of the Federal EHR.
Scott acknowledged the early struggles of the program, particularly around change management and shifting to a standardized enterprise system.
“We had to make sure that everybody understood that: We know you used to do it this way, but now we have to have an enterprise solution. Everybody has to do it the same way. It was tough,” he said.
However, Scott said that as the deployments continued, institutional knowledge expanded. Experienced users became “peer experts,” he said, helping smooth subsequent rollouts and improving implementation consistency.
“After a while, every site became the biggest and the best fielding,” he said. “All that experience and knowledge rolled over from one site into the other. Now, obviously, we’re knocking on the door of VA restarting its deployment. We’re very excited about that. They’re getting 13 sites in 2026.”
Beyond the 13 planned deployments in 2026, the VA has not released a schedule for the remaining 145 sites.