Secretary of Veterans Affairs (VA) Denis McDonough said today that his department’s fiscal year (FY) 2025 budget request features a “maintenance” IT budget, and that the agency plans to dip into money left over from previous years to fund IT programs such as its Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) program.
The proposed FY2025 budget features a 44 percent cut to the agency’s IT modernization account and a 52 percent cut to EHRM program funding. The EHRM cut is reflective of the agency’s decision to reset the program while the VA and contractor Oracle Cerner focus on improvements at the five sites where the EHR system is currently deployed.
However, during a House VA Committee hearing today on the VA’s proposed budget, Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla., expressed her concern that the proposed budget is “focused on maintaining legacy systems over modernizing them.”
“Among the challenges in the budget, this is one,” McDonough said in response. “This is a maintenance budget, I’ll just be very candid with you … and that’s true in IT. We’ve got to make sure that we are maintaining the progress we’ve made.”
“We do have incremental funding so that we can maintain momentum on modernization projects like FMBT [Financial Management Business Transformation] for example,” he added. “Obviously, we’ll stay on top of those, but the budget does force some tough choices and IT is one of those places.”
When looking at the EHRM budget cut in particular, Rep. Cherfilus-McCormick said it “leaves me concerned that there are no real plans to move from reset to implementation.”
The VA initially paused its EHRM deployments in an “assess and address” period in October 2022, with plans to delay further deployments of its Oracle Cerner EHR system until June 2023.
After announcing the reset period in April 2023, the VA has now emphasized that it will not resume deployments of the EHR system until it is confident the system is working properly at the initial five go-live sites.
“We’re not staying in reset forever. We’re going to get into deployment,” McDonough told the committee today. “During the course of this year, as we approach the end of the year, I anticipate us being in discussions to get out of reset.”
When the VA gets to that point, the secretary said that the agency has unused balances from three previous years available “to deploy in the first instance beyond the reset.”
“So, we have existing money that would not be accounted for, prior-year appropriated money not accounted for, in this year’s request that is slated and available for us when we exit reset,” he explained.
McDonough said the VA does not plan on being in reset mode for the entirety of FY2025.
“We’re in a position to continue, as I said, and maintain continued momentum – maybe not at the level we would have anticipated,” he added. “We think it’s prudent to make the decisions that we’re making, and we think that we have a plan to make that happen.”
