Ready, Set, Go-Live: Assessing VA’s EHR Modernization Deployment Readiness
House Subcommittee on Technology Modernization
2025-12-15
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Source: Congress.gov
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The Honorable Seema Verma
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The Honorable Seema Verma
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The Honorable Seema Verma
All right, good afternoon. The Subcommittee on Technology Modernization will now come to order. I want to thank our witnesses for joining us. We continue our oversight of the VA's electronic health record modernization program. I was actually joking with some friends back home recently. They were asking me what it's like my first year in Congress. And I was telling them a little bit about the work we're doing on this subcommittee. And I said, before I came here, I couldn't have even told you what health record system the VA had. And now I spend far too much of my waking hours thinking about it. But appreciate the work that we've done on this committee and for the witnesses that are here today. And right now, of course, we're at a pivotal moment. I think we're down to 117 days until the new system will be launched at four of the medical facilities in my home state that serve the veterans, of course, from my district, but across Michigan and parts of other states as well. This timeline is locked in and the countdown is on. But the question remains, when the switch is flipped in April, will the system deliver and will it do what we need it to do? Are we going to run into snags like we have in the past? For millions of veterans lying on VA hospitals and staff supporting them, this is not something that is theoretical. It's real, it's happening, and we have to do it right. And as I said before, the veterans that we serve and that the department is going to serve have the right to be a little bit unaware of the nuance of which health record system the VA is using. They want it to work right, be able to schedule their appointments, go see their specialists, and move on with their day in a timely way. Veterans expect more than just promises. They expect safe and timely care, and we all expect systems that support our doctors not work against them. Technology should be a tool that opens doors, not a barrier that adds more steps, more clicks, and more frustration. We heard about some of that earlier in this committee term when we saw that providers were getting frustrated with some of the interfacing with the system they have. When we first met on this topic in February, VA was just emerging from a very long pause.
And while progress has been made since then, we know that significant work remains before we go live. VA has standardized over a thousand workflows into a national baseline with the Michigan being the first to use it. VA has tightened their timeline. And for the first time since the pause, we saw large system updates roll out this August without disrupting care. These are meaningful, good signs, but we cannot ignore other red flags that are warnings. Behind the scenes, many tools slated for Michigan have never been tested on a large scale. 34 new complex clinical workflows will debut there for the first time. VA plans to test across four sites simultaneously, a strategy that leaves really no margin for error and something that I have concerns about the risk associated with that. We need assurance that this plan is feasible in the real world, not just on paper or in a computer laboratory.
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