The Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center has gone live on the federal government’s new electronic health record system, in a Saturday launch that completed the Department of Veterans Affairs’ deployment goal for 2026. ExecutiveGov reported the milestone this week from the VA’s announcement, which also covered a simultaneous go-live in Anchorage, Alaska.
Counting Cleveland, Anchorage and 16 affiliated outpatient clinics in Ohio and Alaska, the weekend launches moved more than 163,000 veterans and 7,800 staff onto the system, ExecutiveGov reported. The platform is intended to improve access to patient records, curb redundant testing and strengthen coordination among federal health care providers.
“VA has fulfilled its goal of deploying this new system to 13 hospitals in 2026, a stark turnaround from the nearly two-year delay seen under the prior administration,” VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence said in the VA announcement reported by ExecutiveGov.
More than 780,000 veterans and 42,000 VA clinicians and staff now use the system nationwide, according to ExecutiveGov’s reporting, following earlier 2026 rollouts in Michigan in April, southern Ohio and Kentucky in June, and Indiana in August. The platform shares service members’ health records with the Department of War and pulls in data from community providers.
ExecutiveGov reported that the VA credited the turnaround in part to replacing several electronic health record decision councils with a single council reporting to top leadership, resolving hundreds of issues from its first six go-lives, and deploying one standard build instead of site-by-site modifications. Lawrence visited every site that deployed the system this year, the report said.
For Northeast Ohio veterans, the change is meant to keep care consistent when they move between facilities or need emergency treatment elsewhere, because their records travel with them in the same system used by a growing share of VA hospitals and clinics.
The VA now plans to double its pace to 26 hospitals in 2027, starting in January in Wisconsin and Michigan, ExecutiveGov reported, toward a goal of putting the system in every VA facility by 2031. Deployments continue under Oracle Health’s electronic health record modernization contract, which the VA expanded in August to a $27 billion ceiling and extended through May 2031, according to ExecutiveGov.