I’ve spent over 15 years since leaving the military helping Fortune 500, middle market and growth companies deploy technology to serve customers. I’ve seen what it costs when technology modernizations fail and what it takes to see them through to the end. No project I’ve worked on carries the weight of this one. When the VA’s electronic health record (EHR) system works, veterans get the care they’ve earned. When it doesn’t, they pay for it with their health.
When I left active duty, I had to bring printed and faxed copies of my medical records with me to every doctor. When I applied for benefits from the VA, I had to scan and send documentation from both military and civilian doctors. There was no option for a single record of my continuous care from service to civilian to the VA. This caused months of delays and missed care.
That experience didn’t just stay with me as a veteran. It shaped how I think as a technologist. The technology we create can have a profound impact on the world around us and the people we serve. Outdated infrastructure, legacy systems and inefficient methods can create real harm.
The VA must continue to modernize its EHR system. Not because it’s the technically correct decision, but because the 9 million veterans the VA serves are still living the consequences of the one that hasn’t been made yet.
Oracle Health, through an acquisition of health records company Cerner, was awarded a contract to roll out a modernized records system to solve these challenges. As of 2026, only six of 170 VA medical centers have migrated to the new system and 13 new sites are planned for this year.
The legacy healthcare record system, VistA, was developed in the 1970s and deployed in the 1980s on an architecture that predates the internet. This system is fundamentally incompatible with modern health infrastructure. VistA includes over 130 instances with over 130 unique variations across hospitals and offices. Each has different configurations, customizations and undocumented workarounds built over decades.
Every previous effort to modernize from within that structure failed because you cannot build a modern, interoperable system on top of a patchwork of inconsistent legacy code.
The new EHR system replaces that fragmentation with a centralized system. Updates that previously had to be applied across 130 separate instances can now be deployed once across the enterprise. This allows providers and patients to have access to the same EHR no matter where they go. It also reduces the cost to maintain and update infrastructure. One code base for every hospital.
Historically, each facility managed its own data with its own infrastructure with no reliable way to share patient information in real time with other providers.
New technology changes this underlying model. Patient data lives in one environment, not spread across dozens of independent systems. A VA facility in Ohio can access the same record as a provider in Washington state. Every provider can see the same information in the same format without calling, faxing or scanning medical records. This happens instantaneously.
The old model required manual intervention to send data between offices. Someone had to request a record, track and reconcile it with existing records. Every step introduced an opportunity for errors, delays or missed treatments.
The updated architecture solves this at the source. Data is stored in one instance for all providers with centralized access. Patients don’t need to bring their records with them from provider to provider. The data moves with the patient.
In the old architecture, when a patient moved from military care to VA to private care, medical records stayed in silos. The new system also connects to community care providers, hospitals and civilian medical networks.
The Oracle Health platform is built on FHIR-native APIs (the federal standard for how health data is structured and shared) and participates in TEFCA and CommonWell (the national health information exchange networks) meaning it can exchange data with any compliant system, not just VA or Department of War facilities.
VistA required custom integration for every external connection. Now, data sharing is a native capability. The VA provider is one node in the network of medical providers focused on the patient, not a choke point for manual records.
The initial modernization rollout had its challenges. The VA requested more than 1,500 configurations during the reset period and more remain in the backlog. Critics of the transition sometimes frame the new EHR as a simple swap, one imperfect system replacing another. That misunderstands what is changing at the architectural level. The old system could not be fixed incrementally. There was no single system to fix. New architecture allows the system to be fixed all at once.
With a modernized EHR, my records live in one place across my VA and civilian doctors. My providers have a holistic picture of my medical history, conditions and treatment plan in one place. Data is shared instantaneously. The VA has done the hard work. The technology is ready. The veterans who served this country deserve to have a health system that serves them back.
Austin Higgins is a technology strategy leader, USAF veteran and serves in a leadership role at the Special Operations Association of America, focusing on national security and operational systems
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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