Another national outage this week has prompted a new focus on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Electronic Health Records Modernization effort.

WHY IT MATTERS

The Spokane VA Medical Center said it experienced an outage of its Oracle Health EHR system on Tuesday from approximately 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. local time, which prompted a technical investigation, NBC affiliate KHQ News reported the following day.

Then on Thursday, CNBC reported that the VA confirmed the system outage had disrupted operations at all six VA medical centers, 26 community clinics and remote VA sites running the beleaguered EHR.

According to the original story, EHR users experienced system freezes and could not access vital applications.

Then, the VA reportedly told CNBC that the cause of the outage was a database performance problem, and once the platform was restarted, technical difficulties were resolved. The disruption of the federal EHR system’s function also extended to the U.S. Department of Defense, the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

THE LARGER TREND

On December 20, when the VA announced it would begin to plan for resuming EHR deployments in mid-2026, the agency noted that it had been more than 200 days since the last system outage.

Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office said on February 21 that while the VA’s EHR Modernization Program had made incremental improvements to the system, much more remained to be done. The GAO said that 1,800 requested configuration changes were still outstanding. 

Then on February 24, Dr. Neil Evans, acting program executive director for the VA’s EHR Modernization Integration Office, updated the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Technology Modernization about improvement efforts during the most recent pause on system deployment.

The VA’s new EHR rollout has experienced numerous delays since the first component went live at the VA Central Ohio Healthcare System in Columbus, Ohio, in August 2020.

Seema Verma, Oracle Health and Oracle Life Sciences executive vice president, joined Evans to provide lawmakers with an update. She said that during the latest reset period, the company completed more than 3,000 changes that improved system stability, added enhancements and streamlined certain functions. 

Verma also laid out plans to rapidly scale deployment of the EHR at the VA’s remaining 164 healthcare facilities.

“Maintaining the current pace will take decades, which is not acceptable to anyone,” she said.

We have reached out the VA and Oracle for statements about the new outage and will update this story if they are provided.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.