Four Veterans Affairs health systems in Michigan will activate the department’s new electronic health records system on Saturday, ending a three-year pause to a program that has been plagued by delays and cost overruns.
The VA Detroit Healthcare System, VA Saginaw Healthcare System, VA Ann Arbor and Battle Creek Healthcare Systems will flip the switch from the VA’s legacy digital medical record to the new Federal Electronic Health Record, currently used by six sites across the VA.
The department’s adoption of the Oracle Health’s FEHR was halted in 2023 following a year-long pause over safety and functionality concerns. The program, which was introduced to medical centers in Washington, Oregon and Ohio between 2020 and 2022, experienced numerous setbacks, including incidences of harm to at least 149 patients, according to the VA inspector general.
The safety problems were tied to a system feature that caused some specialty-care referrals, follow-on appointments and lab orders to disappear from view.
VA officials announced in late 2024 that they planned to restart the project in Michigan in 2026, and in March 2025, announced they would accelerate adoption by adding nine more sites this year.
Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence said during an event Friday at the John D. Dingell VA Medical Center in Detroit that the VA expects to roll out the system to 26 additional sites next year.
“But already, folks in the VA system are knowing how well this is going to go. They’re asking to be moved up,” Lawrence said, according to the Detroit News.
Joining Lawrence at the Detroit event marking the “go-live,” VA Secretary Doug Collins said the department’s inspector general would monitor the system to ensure it was functioning.
“Our IG office is a wonderful group that helps us do better in what we do,” Collins said, according to the Detroit News.
The VA selected the system, made by Cerner, in 2017 after it was chosen by the Department of Defense for the military health system patients. The VA system originally was expected to take 10 years to adopt and cost $10 billion. That estimate was soon revised to $16 billion and now stands at $37.2 billion across the program’s lifecycle, according to Lawrence.
During the pause, the VA and Defense Department worked jointly to adopt the system at the James Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago. Between the lessons learned during that rollout and revisions, VA officials have seen vast improvements in performance where it is used, according to Lawrence.
The deputy secretary wrote in a blog post in March that Oracle Health had “improved system performance, reliability and usability,” running it without any outages 87% of the time between June 2023 and December 2025. The system also attained “incident free time” for nearly two years from March 2024 to December 2025, Lawrence wrote.
“The Federal EHR is now reliably available to end users without system-wide outages. We have reduced disruptions, prevented lost productivity and ensured critical workflows continue without delay,” Lawrence said.
Over the last several weeks, the Michigan facilities told patients to expect fewer available appointments and anticipate pharmacy delays in the ramp-up to the switchover.
In a message posted on the VA Detroit Medical Center X social media page, officials told veterans they also may see different prescription numbers on medications until they refill their prescriptions in the new system and could expect to see trainers helping staff learn the system.
“What is not changing is the same high-quality health care you have come to expect at Detroit VA Healthcare System,” they wrote on X.
Republicans and Democrats in Congress have told VA officials they are watching the restart closely and still have concerns about the system’s potential impact on veterans’ medical care and employee burnout.
Rep. Tom Barrett, R-Mich, chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Technology Modernization Subcommittee, said in a hearing in December, that VA physicians and pharmacists continue to have concerns over reliability and safety backstops.
“The only acceptable result is a flawless go live because our veterans cannot accept failure,” Barrett said.
Rep. Nikki Budzinski, D-Ill., said she was concerned that the VA had not completed all recommendations from the Government Accountability Office. The GAO had made several recommendations on improving and implementing the system and the VA had not fulfilled them.
“We need to have the difficult conversations to make sure that both Oracle and VA are accountable to Congress, to VA employees, and most importantly to veterans,” Budzinski said.
Dr. Neil Evans, acting program executive director, said the VA is “ready to roll.”
“VA remains committed to successfully implementing a modern, interoperable Electronic Health Record system, which we refer to as the federal EHR, and we intend to implement that across the entire VA enterprise. As was mentioned, since our last hearing in February, VA has made significant progress towards meeting that goal,” Evans said the hearing.
Patricia Kime is a senior writer covering military and veterans health care, medicine and personnel issues.
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