This story was produced through a partnership between The Washington Post and The Spokesman-Review.
On the eve of a major expansion, a multibillion-dollar project to upgrade the computer systems of all Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals is beset with problems, according to some medical staff who already use it. Critical patient notes disappear. Prescriptions log the wrong dosages. One nurse said the system incorrectly listed one of her patients as dead.
Mike Faught, a case manager at Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center in Spokane, Washington, said he lost access to his patients’ records for two days after a software update in August. “It’s amazing to me that there are still so many problems,” Faught said. “Every time there’s an update, there are unintended consequences.”
The program launched in 2018 to replace the aging computer system used across VA’s health care network, which serves more than 9 million veterans, with an off-the-shelf product that could handle many of the same tasks: organizing important information including appointments, referrals, prescriptions and patient histories.
After the system went live in 2020 at Mann-Grandstaff, doctors and other users began flagging errors that caused delays in treatment and medication mix-ups, and grappling with a system that was routinely offline, according to documents and interviews. As VA expanded to other hospitals and clinics in Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Ohio, the problems followed. In 2023, VA disclosed pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request that the new records system played a role in more than 4,400 cases of “known harms,” ranging from “minor” to “catastrophic.” VA has subsequently confirmed that those cases included six deaths.
In March, VA announced plans to accelerate the Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization program in 2026 to hospitals and clinics in five more states. Officials say many of the problems have been addressed and they are on track to expand an improved version of the system to 13 additional medical centers and their affiliated clinics next year.
“The system does now work,” VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence said in an interview with The Washington Post and The Spokesman-Review in July. He added that the department will be monitoring the individual medical centers that are preparing for the transition and would not proceed if they are not ready. “Obviously, if they didn’t have the infrastructure ready, we couldn’t go live.”
Yet more than a dozen medical professionals at Mann-Grandstaff and five other VA hospital networks using the new system said in interviews that many problems that have plagued the rollout persist, slowing care and, in some cases, threatening patient safety.
To examine the issue, The Post and The Spokesman-Review also reviewed VA records obtained through FOIA, copies of internal emails, conversations on employee message boards, congressional testimony, and reports from the VA Office of Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office.
VA staff at hospitals and clinics using the new system said they field a steady stream of email alerts from VA tech support about problems.
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