The Reality of the VA System: Where It Stands, Where It Fails, and What It Will Actually Take
By a veteran who works on AI-powered EHR systems every day.
The VA is in the middle of the largest healthcare technology overhaul in its history. The Federal Electronic Health Record system is rolling out across the country, claim processing times have dropped, and the backlog has shrunk.
And yet.
I'm a veteran. I work in Athena every day. I see files get lost, records misplaced, prescriptions sent to the wrong people. This isn't Athena being uniquely bad — it's what happens when a system meets the floor, when the people actually using it weren't brought into the process. AI doesn't fix that. It inherits it.
The progress is real. The problems are structural. And the solution isn't more technology — it's people.
What's Actually Working
The disability claims backlog is shrinking. Average time to complete a claim fell from 141.5 days to 80.7 days — a 43% reduction, according to VA's own April 2026 announcement. Claims-processing accuracy has climbed to 94%, the highest in two years. In fiscal 2025, VA processed more than 3 million claims, the most in the department's history.
The EHR rollout is moving again. After a multi-year pause, VA deployed the Federal EHR at four Michigan hospitals in April 2026 — the first wave of 13 planned deployments for the year. As of the most recent go-live in August, the system covers more than 617,000 veterans and 35,000 VA clinicians and staff, nearly double where it stood in the spring.
Digital tools are closing gaps. The Claim Assist Portal, launched in March 2026, lets veterans respond to VA evidence requests digitally instead of waiting on the mail — a real improvement in a process that's historically been a paperwork slog.
These are genuine gains. The VA is not standing still.
Where It Breaks Down
The cost is spiraling — and nobody can fully explain why
The VA-Oracle contract started at a $10 billion ceiling. In August 2026, VA extended it by another $17 billion, pushing the total to roughly $27 billion. At a House Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing on September 2, VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence put the full lifecycle cost — deployment through 2031 plus sustainment — at around $48 billion. The committee voted 19–0 to subpoena Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison and CEO Mike Sicilia after the company skipped the hearing, with members from both parties calling the increase "unreasonable."
Oracle had told the Senate in 2022 that it would absorb any costs beyond the original $10 billion cap. That commitment didn't hold.
Meanwhile, GAO reports that VA still hasn't fully implemented 14 of 18 recommendations meant to fix the program's cost estimating, scheduling, and testing — including none of the 12 recommendations GAO flagged as priorities. VA has not yet produced an updated, independent lifecycle cost estimate, despite Congress requesting one over a year ago.
Faster isn't always better
The backlog is down, and that's a real win. But speed and accuracy aren't the same thing. VA's own FY2025 approval rate came in around 62% — meaning close to 4 in 10 claims were denied. That's roughly consistent with recent years, and it's a reminder that a faster "no" is still a no. Veterans denied benefits should know that appeals — especially Higher-Level Reviews with new evidence — succeed at meaningfully higher rates than first-time claims.
The system has a people problem
Here's what I see every day, and what the record confirms:
Medication data doesn't reliably follow the patient. VA's Office of Inspector General found that a software coding error caused inaccurate medication and allergy information to transmit between the new Oracle EHR and the VA's legacy system — affecting an estimated 250,000 veterans as of September 2023. Providers at legacy sites were left performing manual safety checks that OIG called unsustainable.
Fixing it takes real staff, not just software patches. At the VA's Central Ohio Healthcare System in Columbus, clearing the resulting prescription backlog required a permanent 62% increase in clinical pharmacists — plus dozens of homegrown workarounds and training materials that OIG said were themselves overwhelming staff.
This isn't unique to VA, or to America. In New South Wales, Australia, frontline workers described the 2026 rollout of the state's Epic-based patient record system as "a bin fire" — poor training, trainers with no clinical experience, and staff left to teach themselves on their own time. In Norway, a 2024 national survey of physicians found the Epic-based system used in the Central Norway health region scored just 17 out of 100 on a standard usability scale — a score researchers classify as an outright failure, against a national average above 50.
And the stakes are real. A 2026 investigation by The Spokesman-Review and The Washington Post linked the new EHR to more than 4,600 cases of patient harm — including six deaths — at facilities using the system as of August 2025.
Showing up matters. The VFW told Congress in September 2026 that the Michigan rollout went more smoothly because VA leadership visited VFW posts before go-live to talk directly with veterans — something the VFW had been asking for. As the organization put it, modernizing a system this size "cannot be managed solely from Washington, D.C."
What It Will Actually Take
Put experienced EHR users on the floor, not just in the planning room. The person who knows the workflow and the system is the implementation — not a stakeholder to be managed.
Budget for the second and third wave. Pilots always look good. The real test is what happens when the pilot team moves on. VA is hiring 400 support staff for the rollout — a start that needs to be sustained through 2031, not just through this year's go-lives.
Build trust deliberately. Veterans have been burned by delays and lost paperwork before. Trust isn't a launch-day press release — it's earned by being right when it matters and honest when it isn't.
Listen to the people who already know where it breaks. The veteran working in the EHR every day knows more about the failure modes than the vendor does.
Prepare for the miss rate. A system that's right 90% of the time still fails 1 in 10 times — quietly, in a wrong entry or a denied claim, until someone's care is affected.
The Bottom Line
The VA is making real progress. The backlog is down. The EHR is deploying again. Veterans should know that.
But the problems don't disappear because the technology improves. They disappear when the people using the system are treated as partners, not end-users — when training is a process, not a checkbox, and when the veteran in the room is listened to before the rollout, not after. AI can make the job faster. It cannot make people trust a system they weren't brought into.
Sources: VA and GAO public statements and press releases (2026); GAO-26-109393 and related VA EHRM reports; VA OIG congressional testimony (Feb. 2024, updated through 2025); House Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing, Sept. 2, 2026; VFW congressional testimony, Sept. 2, 2026; Medical Republic/Health Services Daily reporting on the NSW SDPR rollout; Norwegian Medical Association EHR usability survey (2024); The Spokesman-Review/Washington Post investigation (2026).
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