The Department of Veterans Affairs' Oracle Health implementation at one of its Chicago-area facilities is exceeding early expectations, Nextgov reported March 27.
The March 9 Oracle Health EHR implementation at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago, Ill., is one of the most successful deployments of the new EHR system, Shereef Elnahal, MD, VA's undersecretary for health, said at a department meeting March 26.
"We'll be very transparent when problems arise and we'll jump on any issue to fix it," Dr. Elnahal said. "But so far, I think, in part because of the incredible teamwork between VA and DOD, but also the learnings — we've had significant learnings over the last several years — we think the deployment's going quite well so far."
The news of the implementation's success at the Lovell facility comes shortly after the VA's Office of Inspector General released three reports indicating that the new EHR system had issues at the five VA medical facilities where the software had been deployed prior to the rollout at Lovell.
The VA stated that it will continue to monitor the EHR deployment at Lovell to ensure that no issues arise.
The VA is looking to resume the Oracle Health rollout at additional VA medical centers after the deployment was paused in April 2023 due to ongoing problems.