VA Electronic Health Record Modernization: Actions Needed to Sustain Accelerated System Deployments

Filed 50m ago · Via GAO · The Buffoon Desk

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Plaint

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: David Lisbona from Haifa, Israel · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

GAO testimony to Congress lays out the VA's fourth attempt in two decades to modernize its electronic health record system, a program that has drawn 18 recommendations from the watchdog since 2020, 12 of them flagged as priority. As of August 2026, the VA has fully implemented only four of those 18, leaving ten priority recommendations — covering user dissatisfaction, unresolved trouble tickets and inadequate testing — still unaddressed.

VA halted deployments in 2023 after veterans and clinicians said the new system wasn't meeting expectations, restarted in December 2024, and now plans to accelerate to roughly 170 sites by 2031. Congressional committees asked for a detailed cost estimate and schedule by September 30, 2025; VA has delivered a notional schedule but no cost estimate or documentation showing it follows leading practices.

GAO has designated VA health care a High-Risk area partly because of this very program, a designation that predates the current acceleration plan and, on this record, still applies to it.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A program that has failed three times before doesn't inspire confidence by announcing it will now go faster with fewer fixed problems. Handing Congress a ‘notional schedule’ instead of a cost estimate is the bureaucratic equivalent of promising dinner is almost ready while the stove is still in the box. Veterans are the ones stuck waiting on the softer, cheaper version of ‘we'll get to it.’

Source: Read the original at GAO → Scored: Plaint · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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