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 leaders on Monday announced the next 13 sites to receive the department’s embattled new electronic health records system, including multiple facilities in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.

The sites were chosen after VA Secretary Doug Collins earlier this month announced plans to accelerate deployment of the Oracle Millennium system, currently in operation at six of VA’s 170-plus medical locations. Regional and local leaders, as well as officials from Oracle, helped select the next deployment targets.

In a statement Monday, Collins said the faster rollout will give veterans “a modern medical record system that will result in improvements to care, coordination and convenience.”

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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 the project was fully halted in 2023 after multiple problems with staff training and patient safety issues. Only one site — a joint Defense Department and VA hospital — has started using the software since then.

VA officials said they expect full implementation of the new health records system to be completed at every VA facility by early 2031, four years behind the original schedule.

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Planners had previously announced that four VA sites in Michigan — VA Battle Creek Medical Center, VA Detroit Healthcare System, VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, and VA Saginaw Healthcare System — would go live with the records software in 2026.

The newly-announced sites include:

• Chillicothe VA Medical Center in Chillicothe, Ohio;
• Cincinnati VA Medical Center in Cincinnati, Ohio;
• Dayton VA Medical Center in Dayton, Ohio;
• Louis Stokes VA Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio;
• Cincinnati VA Medical Center Fort Thomas in Fort Thomas, Kentucky;
• Fort Wayne VA Medical Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana;
• Marion VA Medical Center in Marion, Indiana;
• Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center in Indianapolis, Indiana;
• and the Alaska VA Healthcare System in Anchorage, Alaska.

Specific implementation dates for each of the sites will be released sometime in the future.

Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have been skeptical of department plans to restart the records system rollout, insisting on clear training and safety guidelines for the work.

But Collins said he is confident in the new plans, and wants the project to move forward more quickly than the previous administration had planned.

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