This article by Leo Shane III originally appeared on Military Times, the nation's largest independent newsroom dedicated to covering the military and veteran community.

Veterans Affairs officials will pick up their electronic health record overhaul effort with four new sites in Michigan in mid-2026, restarting the controversial program roughly three years after it was halted because of concerns over patient safety.

Department leaders said they are confident that improvements made to the system and to VA processes will produce a better result this time, and said the decision to move ahead needed to be made now to get infrastructure in place to proceed with the work over the next year.

“We said that we were going to take the time that we needed to get things right, to get to a point where we were confident that it was time to restart preparing for deployment,” said Dr. Neil Evans, acting program executive director of VA’s EHRM Integration Office. “We spent a little over a year and a half focused on that. We’re seeing positive outcomes from that effort.

“Now we’re talking about getting restarted with planning the next deployments.”

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The health records overhaul project, launched by President Donald Trump in 2017, was designed to bring veterans’ health records in line with military files for the first time.

The project was originally scheduled to take 10 years and cost $16 billion. But nearly eight years later, only six of VA’s 170-plus medical sites are using the software.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough in April 2023 announced a full pause of the rollout after concerns from investigators and lawmakers over patient safety, regarding lost or missing files from active patients.

Since then, VA has been reviewing those errors and working with Oracle officials on system improvements, Evans said.

“Patient safety is always going to be the top priority of the Veterans Health Administration,” he said. “Before we went into the reset, there were system issues that had been identified. Some of them were configuration changes, some of them were process changes. We identified a list of items that needed to be fixed that would improve or lessen patient safety risk, and those have been completed.

“We still expect to see folks raising concerns, because that’s how we find issues that we can address. But overall, we’ve seen past go-lives result in a decrease in patient safety issues.”

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In March, VA administrators at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in Illinois fully switched over to the new health records system. That site is jointly run by the Defense Department and VA, presenting a unique opportunity to train staff from both agencies at the same time.

VA officials have described that rollout as a success, reporting fewer problems and complaints than at previous sites. They also said that veterans’ trust scores at the five facilities where the new record system is in use have risen since the start of the rest period.

The number of system outages — a frequent complaint among staff using the system — have also decreased dramatically in recent months. Program officials said it has been more than 200 days since the last outage.

“We paused deployments of the EHR for more than a year and a half to listen to veterans and clinicians, understand the issues, and make improvements to the system,” VA Deputy Secretary Tanya Bradsher said. “As a result of those efforts, veteran trust and system performance have improved across the board.”

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Pre-deployment preparation will begin at the Michigan sites in the next few weeks. Whether the inauguration of Trump for his second term in office will change that schedule is unclear.

Evans said the restart announcement is being made now to prepare the Michigan sites for the work ahead, including developing training schedules for staff.

A specific launch date is expected to be announced before the start of 2026.

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