U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Auburn) hopes that the newly confirmed U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Douglas A. Collins, will be able to curb waste with the proposed rollout of the Oracle federal Electronic Health Record (EHR) system after lawmakers expressed concern with spending and efficiency in recent months.
The EHR's rollout was initially paused in 2023 amid concerns over the safety and reliability of the program.
The VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) found in September 2024 that the VA still needed to strengthen the EHR system to address "major performance incidents," which included 80 hours of interrupted service.
"As the agency responsible for modernizing the EHR, VA should implement policies and procedures to prevent or minimize damage and interruption to critical systems," the OIG report states. "Although the contract specifies that Oracle Health takes responsibility for the technical system, including monitoring, VA is ultimately responsible for maintaining situational awareness of the system to make effective, timely and informed risk management decisions."
In December, the VA said it would resume its rollout in 2026. However, Collins said in an interview with the Military Times this week that he planned to speed up the implementation, potentially doubling or tripling the number of VA hospitals online with the new system in 2026.
VA facilities nationwide also experienced a nearly six-hour outage last week after the EHR system crashed.
The EHR system was the focal point of much of the examination of Collins in January and Paul Lawrence as VA Deputy Secretary in February.
The VA is nearly eight years into the 10-year contract with Oracle, with the system operating in fewer than 4% of VA medical centers, six facilities in total. During the confirmation hearing, lawmakers balked at the lack of efficiency and the ambiguity of the final cost.
During Collins's confirmation hearing, he stated that one of his main priorities was finding out why the VA has so little to show after billions in spending.
"That is a program now that has went too many years and cost too many billions of dollars without finding a solution, and my commitment is one of the very first priorities, if confirmed, is to figure out why," Collins said.
Tuberville also chimed in, bemoaning the lack of results after investing $20 billion in the program. He claimed that the DoD has successfully updated its systems while the VA rollout has stagnated.
"Nobody's told you this: $20 billion on updating our VA's electronic health care records over the last decade, the Department of Defense completed their update, yet the VA has nothing to show for the $20 billion," Tuberville said. "Houston, we got a problem."
"Houston, Atlanta, DC, everywhere else, we have a problem," Collins responded. "That is not acceptable. That's one of the things that we're going to, as we've said earlier, and we talked about this earlier, we're going to have to get into very quickly, put every player on the table to make sure that we're getting it right."
The total cost is also disputed, with figures varying depending on the source.
In late February, the House Committee on Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Technology Modernization held an oversight hearing titled: "From Reset to Rollout: Can the VA EHRM Program Finally Deliver?".
During the hearing, Carol Harris, director of Information Technology and Cybersecurity Issues at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GOA), stated that the cost estimate for the EHR implementation did not consider the program's hiatus to address multiple security and reliability.
"Congress has not received a schedule nor an up-to-date cost estimate to evaluate this program's current state," said sub-Committee chairman Tom Barrett (R-Mi.). "The only independent cost estimate we can rely on for what it will cost VA to implement this program is already three years old. It was over $32 billion; that's more than double VAs original estimate of $16.1 billion. Given these facts, VA needs to demonstrate how this system has improved and explain why this program can succeed before starting up again."
In response, Harris stated that Congress "could not reliably rely on this estimate" due to "too many changes to the program."
"There obviously was this program reset over a two-year period with additional work being done, and none of that has been accounted for within the cost estimate," Harriss responded. "So that estimate needs to be updated before we proceed. Because again, when you take a look at how much has been sunk, $12.7 billion already, and we've only deployed to six sites. If you were to just multiply that across the 94% of medical centers that have not had the same system. I mean, that could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars potentially."
Despite the ongoing problems, Tuberville told 1819 News that he believed Collins would implement the program effectively and without incurring astronomical costs to the taxpayer.
"The VA has spent tens of billions of dollars updating the Electronic Health Record system, and we still have nothing to show for it," Tuberville told 1819 News. "President Trump was elected with a mandate from the American people to end business as usual in Washington and to bring generational change. Secretary Collins is finally putting our veterans first, and that must start with cutting back on administrative waste. I am confident Secretary Collins will work to develop a system for our veterans that is both usable and a wise use of our taxpayer dollars."
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