WASHINGTON D.C. — Today, U.S. Senators Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Patty Murray (D-WA), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) sent a new letter to U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Secretary Doug Collins, demanding answers from the VA ahead of the scheduled deployment of the Electronic Health Record modernization (EHR, or EHRM) program at 13 new sites next year, including 4 sites in Michigan, despite serious issues and system defects that remain unaddressed.
“VA embarked on the EHRM program in October 2020 with the goal of improving the quality of care for veterans by updating the outdated VistA system to allow for better communication between the Department of Defense, VA, and community care providers,” the Senators wrote. “While we should always strive to innovate and improve the quality of care for veterans, in practice, the rollout of EHRM has been so problematic that it created life-threatening problems and ongoing upheaval for veterans’ ability to get the health care they need.”
According to a VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) report from 2024, VA’s new EHR system played a role in the 2022 death of a veteran in Ohio, due to errors in the scheduling function that resulted in staff not following up with patients who missed their appointments. Following a litany of serious implementation problems across hospitals in multiple states after the initial rollout in 2020, the VA announced a “reset” period in April 2023 where it paused the expansion of EHR to additional VA hospitals to focus on improving sites where EHRM is currently in use.
In December 2024, VA announced that it was beginning early-stage planning to deploy the EHR system to four facilities in Michigan. In March, VA announced that it will complete nine additional medical facilities—bringing the total to 13 facilities expected to go live in 2026. According to VA, complete deployment of the system is anticipated at all VA medical facilities anticipated as early as 2031.
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report in March 2025 found that 58 percent of users of the modernized EHR system believed the new system increased patient safety risks. The GAO report also found that VA had not addressed over half of the configuration changes that administrators had requested, leaving a backlog of 1,800 changes unaddressed as it proceeded with implementation. The report made three new recommendations to VA—only one of which has been implemented this year—and stated that VA still has not responded to or implemented 14 previous EHR recommendations that it called “critical to reducing EHR risks and delivering a quality system.”
In their letter, the senators also requested a staff briefing and answers by January 19th to a number of questions about VA’s rollout plan for EHR, staffing levels, whether VA plans will implement outstanding recommendations from the GAO report, and the guardrails VA has in place to ensure patient safety as it expands EHR to new states.
The full text of the letter to Secretary Collins is available HERE.
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