Department of Veterans Affairs announced July 25 that 23.5 million veterans' health records have been successfully transferred to a shared data center with the U.S. Department of Defense.
The data transition phase began in late spring, and the VA plans to go live on the new $16 billion Cerner EHR system, which will be interoperable with the DOD's platform, in 2020. The data transferred spanned 21 clinical domains of patient medical records, which includes lab results, prescription medications, diagnoses and procedures and other health data.
The new EHR system will replace the VA's legacy platform VistA in more than 130 instances, which the DOD also used.
"For decades, VA and DoD have been struggling to achieve interoperability and seamlessly share patient records between our health systems — placing an unfair burden on our veterans and their families," VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said in a news release. "No veteran, family member or caregiver should have to carry boxes of paper, medical and service records around. This data migration is the first step to solving that problem for good."