The Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization (FEHRM) office is moving the Federal EHR to the cloud, a move that the office’s chief technology officer (CTO) said will help agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) with their EHR rollout.
Lance Scott, the CTO at the FEHRM, joined the ACT-IAC Health Innovation Summit on Friday in Reston, Va., to explain that the cloud transformation is “no small feat” and will take about 18 months to two years to complete.
The Federal Electronic Health Record (EHR) is a single EHR system used by multiple Federal agencies like the VA, Department of Defense (DoD), U.S. Coast Guard, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Notably, the VA’s Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) program aims to provide a seamless experience for veterans as they transition from receiving care under the DoD to receiving care under the VA, with a single, fully integrated EHR system.
The VA is deploying the Federal EHR system at a total of 13 sites in fiscal year (FY) 2026, with the help of its contractor Oracle Health – formerly Oracle Cerner.
“What we’re doing is we’re setting the stage,” Scott said of the FEHRM’s transition to the cloud. “Oracle has a myriad of phenomenal things that are coming … and those things can’t happen unless we have the OCI [Oracle Cloud Infrastructure] stage set and ready for them to take advantage of the really high-speed services that OCI is going to bring.”
“We’re a success if we do that, if we set the stage correctly for them to use to make the myriad of changes functional, changes they want to use to make the Federal EHR better, more efficient, and faster for the user,” Scott said.
One of the capabilities the FEHRM is bringing to bear is what’s called the “seamless exchange.” Scott said that seamless exchange will help Federal agencies and their clinicians with “information overload.”
The CTO explained that this effort is based on three pillars: data deduplication, data provenance, and auto-ingestion of data. This will allow clinicians to spend more time with their patients and less time looking for vitals, radiology reports, and other relevant health data.
“The VA has conducted a very successful pilot for seamless exchange last November, up in Walla Walla, Washington,” Scott said. “They are going live with an enterprise deployment of the capability in November. DoD will be soon following on their heels after they’ve proven that it is scalable to the entire enterprise.”
Scott told MeriTalk that capabilities like seamless exchange will “absolutely” help the VA as it rolls out its EHR system to more sites next year.
“We’re really excited about the VA’s rollout to 13 new sites in FY26. We’re working very closely, obviously, at the FEHRM with the VA,” Scott said. “I think there’s a lot of lessons learned from the DoD’s deployment that the VA is leveraging. A lot of the new technology … seamless and everything else, it’s just going to enhance the experience for the user.”