House committee scrutinizes Oracle’s Larry Ellison over veterans health records project

The House Veterans’ Affairs Committee has issued a subpoena to Oracle chairman Larry Ellison over the company’s role in the Department of Veterans Affairs’ troubled electronic health records modernization project. Oracle, which inherited the project through its $28 billion acquisition of Cerner in June 2022, now finds itself facing congressional scrutiny. A project that keeps getting more expensive and less functional The Electronic Health Record Modernization program, or EHRM, was supposed to be the VA’s great digital leap forward. Launched in 2018 with a contract awarded to Cerner, the project aimed to modernize health records across more than 170 VA facilities. The original price tag was projected at around $10 billion. Contract modifications have pushed the project’s budget to approximately $27 billion, with an extended timeline running through May 2031. Lifecycle cost estimates for the full program range from $37 billion to $50 billion. Early deployments beginning in 2020 led to thousands of reported patient harm incidents, including deaths. The problems were severe enough to trigger a temporary halt in new deployments. Oracle rebranded Cerner as Oracle Health after the acquis...