The Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center and the clinics of the VA Northeast Ohio Healthcare System will switch to the new Federal Electronic Health Record on Saturday, October 24, 2026. Staff marked the change a day early with a “Cleveland Rocks” go-live kickoff celebration on Friday, October 23, ahead of the Saturday transition to the new system for veterans’ medical records.
Cleveland is one of the final two deployments of the system scheduled for 2026. A VA facility in Anchorage, Alaska, makes the same switch on October 24. The Department of Veterans Affairs deployed the Federal Electronic Health Record at 11 hospitals during 2026, including sites in southern Ohio and Kentucky in June and three hospitals in Indiana in August, before the rollout reaches Northeast Ohio this weekend.
The Federal Electronic Health Record is the same system the Department of Defense adopted in 2017. Its purpose is to give VA and the Defense Department a single shared record system, so that a veteran’s health information is kept in one format rather than in separate systems that do not work the same way from place to place.
The new system replaces VA’s legacy record system, known as VistA and CPRS, which has been in use since the 1980s. According to VA, the legacy system operates differently at every facility, and it does not easily share records with the Department of Defense. That gap is one of the main problems the Federal Electronic Health Record is intended to address as facilities make the switch.
The national rollout has not moved in a straight line. VA paused the deployment in 2023 after performance and safety concerns were raised at early sites, and the program later resumed under an accelerated schedule. VA has also hired additional staff to support the rollouts as more facilities convert to the new system.
For veterans in Northeast Ohio, the change is aimed at letting their records follow them seamlessly between the Department of Defense, VA and participating community providers. Instead of a record shaped by the system at one facility, the Federal Electronic Health Record is designed so that the same information can move with the veteran across those settings as care continues.
The go-live takes effect Saturday, October 24, at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center and across the VA Northeast Ohio Healthcare System’s clinics. The Cleveland switch is one step in a longer national conversion: VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence has said the administration is committed to having the system in place at every VA facility by 2031.