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 acquisition. The VA has since pursued what officials describe as a multi-year reset of the project, with a target of completing rollouts across 13 sites by 2026.
Why Ellison, and why now
The House Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee has held multiple hearings probing the safety, costs, and deployment readiness of the system. A February 2024 session took a deep dive into pharmacy-related failures, while a December 2025 hearing focused on broader oversight questions.
Seema Verma, who leads Oracle Health, has testified on the company’s efforts to fix the system. A subpoena for Ellison himself represents something different entirely, signaling that lawmakers want answers from the very top of Oracle’s corporate hierarchy.
Ellison co-founded Oracle in 1977 and currently serves as chairman and chief technology officer. Oracle has maintained active lobbying efforts aimed at VA committees.
Patient safety at the center
The thousands of reported patient safety incidents tied to early deployments include cases where medications were improperly prescribed, records were lost or inaccessible, and clinical workflows broke down in ways that put lives at risk. Some of those incidents resulted in deaths.
The VA serves roughly nine million veterans through its healthcare system.
What this means for Oracle and government tech contracting
With the EHRM contract alone worth approximately $27 billion, and lifecycle costs potentially reaching $50 billion, this represents one of the largest government IT projects in history.