The Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center went live Saturday on the federal government’s new electronic health record system, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced, completing the department’s 2026 deployment schedule at 13 hospitals.
The Cleveland rollout, paired with a simultaneous go-live at the Alaska VA Healthcare System in Anchorage, also reached 16 standalone clinics associated with the two medical centers across Ohio and Alaska. The VA said the Cleveland and Anchorage deployments together bring more than 163,000 veterans and 7,800 staff onto the new system.
The Federal Electronic Health Record is intended to let VA, the Department of War and other federal partners transfer military health records seamlessly, and to pull information from private-sector facilities into a veteran’s VA care. The VA said that should mean fewer duplicative tests because earlier results cannot be found, appointments that leave clinicians less time wrestling with technology, and better continuity when a veteran transfers between facilities or needs emergency care somewhere new.
Nationally, the VA said more than 780,000 veterans and 42,000 clinicians and staff are now using the new system after this year’s 13 deployments. Cleveland’s go-live followed earlier 2026 deployments in Michigan in April, southern Ohio and Kentucky in June, and Indiana in August, under what the department described as an accelerated schedule with a standardized system rather than locally customized versions.
“VA has fulfilled its goal of deploying this new system to 13 hospitals in 2026,” VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence said in the department’s announcement. Lawrence, the VA’s lead official on the rollout, visited all 13 deployment sites this year, and the department said it has hired dozens of additional staff to support the transition, with plans to hire more.
For Cleveland-area veterans, the practical change is behind the scenes: their records at the Stokes center and its associated clinics are now on the same platform the VA is spreading system-wide, rather than on the legacy system the department is retiring. The VA said facilities on the shared record can also share best practices with one another more easily.
The work is not finished. The VA is scheduled to deploy the system at 26 additional medical centers in 2027, starting in January with four hospitals in Wisconsin and Michigan, on the way to a stated goal of having the new record in every VA facility by 2031.