The Dayton medical center, found on the VA’s West Third Street campus, will be among nine VA medical facilities that will move to the Electronic Health Record system next year, the Department of Veterans Affairs said earlier this month.
The new EHR (electronic health record) system will allow VA physicians and nurses to have a “more complete story of a veteran’s health,” tracking health issues and treatments from the time a veteran enlisted in the military until today, DeFrancesco said.
To prepare for the new system, the center is upgrading its IT closets, IT infrastructure and equipment to ensure that it has the backbone infrastructure to handle the EHR system, free of delays, slowness or “latency” issues, she said.
The new system should be in place by about June 1, 2026.
Visitors may see evidence of the IT work on almost every floor on the center, with work on endpoints, switches, fiber runs and more.
“It helps us to essentially future-proof” the center, the director said. “It’s a major upgrade to our whole IT backbone.”
The IT contract was awarded in late 2024.
DeFrancesco and a center spokeswoman said veteran records will already be in the system. The goal: Veterans should be able to spend more time with their doctors and less time repeating their health histories to various caregivers.
“I’m confident that any barriers or any hurdles we may have we’ll be able to address, and we’ll have a really smooth rollout,” DeFrancesco said.
EHR rollouts — nationwide, a 10-year, $16 billion project — had been on hold since 2023, when the VA department paused the process to address problems with the system. But Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins had pledged to resume movement toward electronic records.
If a veteran is referred from another VA, the transition should be seamless because the veteran’s history is already in the system, a Dayton VA spokeswoman said.
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