Oracle's federal electronic health record system experience a widespread outage on Tuesday March 4 that impacted VA medical facilities across the country, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
All users of Oracle's federal EHR, including those at VA, Department of Defense, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sites, experienced a nationwide outage of the EHR system, a VA spokesperson confirmed to Fierce Healthcare.
The outage affected six VA medical centers, 26 community clinics and remote supporting VA sites.
"Users of the Federal EHR first reported freezing and the inability to access applications at 8:37 a.m. ET, due to a database performance issue," the VA spokesperson said. "Oracle Health restarted the system, and the issues were resolved and cleared by VA at 2:05 p.m. ET, with full access to EHR applications restored."
Affected VA medical facilities followed standard contingency procedures during the outage to ensure continuity of care for Veterans.
Oracle Health did not respond to a request for comment.
The VA said that Oracle Health is conducting a full root cause analysis to determine what triggered the outage.
The technical disruption comes as the VA plans to speed up deployment of Oracle's EHR, planning to have a total of 13 sites go live in 2026. The agency said in a statement Thursday March 6 that it could complete deployment of the EHR at all VA medical facilities as early as 2031.
In December, the VA said four sites in Michigan— Ann Arbor, Battle Creek, Detroit, and Saginaw —would go live in 2026, and the agency has now added nine additional VA facilities to that deployment schedule.
The nine additional VA facilities will be announced later this year following planning sessions among officials from VA’s Electronic Health Record Modernization Office, regional and local VA medical leaders, VA clinicians, and EHR vendor Oracle Health, the VA said in a press release issued Thursday.
The VA announced in April 2023 that it pausing deployments of the EHR system as a "program reset" to address major issues with the software. Executives had vowed to get the rollout “back on track” amid lawmaker scrutiny that has persisted into 2023.
The agency said is has made critical improvements to the EHR system in the past nearly two years. "These improvement efforts will continue unabated while VA begins early-stage deployment efforts in Michigan," the VA said in a December press release.
In a recent interview with Military Times, VA Secretary Doug Collins called the initial schedule to roll out to four sites "too short-sighted and slow." He promised quicker delivery on the pledge of a revamped health records system for patients and employees.
“This has been a $10 billion project that’s not going anywhere,” Collins said to the Military Times. “So I’m pleased to announce right now that we’re moving forward on a new plan that is going to bring by next year double or almost triple the number of hospitals online."
“We’ve worked through standardization. We’ve got some plans now that, after almost two and a half years of nothing, we’re now moving forward to get this project done. There’s a lot going on here that I’m excited about," Collins told the publication.
The VA signed a $10 billion deal with health tech company Cerner, now owned by Oracle, in May 2018 to move from the VA’s customized Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) platform to an off-the-shelf electronic health records system. The goal was to align the country’s largest health system with the Department of Defense, which has already started integrating Cerner’s MHS Genesis system.
Now seven years later, only six out of the VA's 170-plus medical sits are using the new EHR software.
Software giant Oracle closed its nearly $30 billion deal to acquire Cerner in June 2022 and inherited the company's VA tech project and is working to fix the problem-riddled system. VA has spent roughly $5 billion of taxpayer money to implement the Oracle Cerner EHR system at six of 171 medical centers, where it has badly disrupted operations for veterans and VA providers, according to federal lawmakers.
In a statement, Collins said the VA "can and will" move faster on the project. "But we’re going to listen to our doctors, nurses and vendor partners along the way in order to ensure patient safety, quality and customer service,” Collins said.
The VA is pursuing a market-based approach to site selection for its deployments going forward, the agency said. This will enable the department to scale up the number of concurrent deployments, while also enabling staff to work as efficiently as possible.
VA will adopt a standard baseline of products, workflows, and integrations aligned with subject-matter-expert recommendations. The standardized national baseline will ensure successful Federal EHR implementation, accelerate deployments, simplify decision-making, and support future optimizations, according to the agency.