One dot per VA medical center. One hundred sixty-four of them. Press play and watch eleven years of the federal EHR rollout — and watch the schedule run out.
Primary source: Edward Graham, “VA deploys new EHR at 3 Indiana-based medical facilities,” Nextgov/FCW, Aug 24 2026
Data: VA EHR Modernization — official Deployment Schedule (digital.va.gov, tables updated Aug 24 2026)
Saturday's go-lives at Indianapolis, Fort Wayne and Marion brought 102,000 more veterans and 6,000 more staff onto the federal EHR, and brought VA to 11 hospitals deployed this year — more than the previous five years combined, which hold five.
Below, each of the 164 medical centers in the program's own denominator is a dot. Red dots have a published go-live date. The navy ring is where the count would have to be, at that moment, to keep the promise of every facility by 2031.
June 2020
0live or dated
02031 pace needs
164still gray
Live on the federal EHRScheduled, date publishedNo published date2031 requirement line
What the animation is showing you
For the first six years almost nothing moves. Spokane in October 2020, four sites in 2022, one joint VA/DoD facility in 2024 — with a three-year freeze after the April 2023 pause while VA worked through delays, cost overruns, technical issues and patient safety concerns.
Then 2026 arrives and the field starts filling in waves: four Michigan sites in April, four in Ohio and Kentucky in June, three in Indiana on Saturday, two more scheduled for Alaska and Ohio in October. Twenty-six more are on the books for 2027, in six named waves.
And in November 2027 the fill stops. Not because the program stops — because that is the last date VA has published. One hundred nineteen dots stay gray, and the navy requirement line keeps climbing without them.
The arithmetic in the gap
Live today · 17 of 164 (10.4%)
With a published date · 45 of 164, last one November 2027
Undated · 119, to be done in the four years after that
Required pace, 2028–2031 · ~29 medical centers a year
VA's lifetime pace since Spokane · 2.9 a year
VA's best published year (2027 plan) · 26So the 2031 promise needs roughly ten times the program's lifetime average, and about 11% more than its most aggressive published year — sustained for four consecutive years with no slipped wave. Not impossible. Never yet done once.
“VA has now deployed this modern EHR system at 11 hospitals in 2026 — nearly doubling the number of deployments seen in the previous five years.”
Paul Lawrence, VA Deputy Secretary, statement, Aug 24 2026 — via Nextgov
The money moved the same week and in the same direction. VA added three option years and $17 billion to the Oracle contract, raising it from the original $10 billion signed with Cerner in May 2018 to just under $27 billion — and said it anticipates using the remaining ceiling by the first quarter of fiscal 2027. Divided across the denominator, that is roughly $165M per medical center. Arithmetic, not accounting: VA does not publish per-site spend.
Before you quote any percentage off this chart
The denominator is doing more work than the numerator
VA's own page disagrees with VA's own page. The prose on the deployment schedule says “14 medical centers currently live”; the tables below it list 17. The tables were updated Aug 24 and the sentence wasn't.
164 is not the only official number. VHA separately reports 170 VA medical centers and 1,380 health care facilities overall. Nothing published explains the 164/170 gap. The same 17 sites are 10.4%, 10.0% or 1.2% depending on which official figure you pick.
A dot is not a constant amount of work. Saturday's three hospitals carried 16 associated clinics with them. Treating every dot as one unit is the chart's convenience, not the program's reality.
2027 dates are month-only, and nothing at all is published past November 2027. Everything the animation shows after that is the requirement, not a plan.
“By 2031” is a stated commitment, not a schedule. No document ties a named facility to a 2028–2031 date.
Here is the thing worth carrying out of this. The reflex is to read the gray field as failure, and it isn't — 2026 is the best year this program has had, by a wide margin, after a genuinely hard reset. The real signal is quieter: the published plan and the public promise stop touching each other in November 2027. If you build anything that assumes a VA site is on Oracle Health by a given year, that November is the date your assumption becomes a guess.
⚠︎ AI-generated · not reviewed by a human · verify against the linked sources before relying on it. Site names and dates are transcribed from VA's published deployment schedule; everything after November 2027 is this page's arithmetic, not VA's.