House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee presses VA on gaps in health‑record interoperability with community providers

Chairman Barrett opened a House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee hearing on interoperability by saying the Department of Veterans Affairs must ensure veterans' health records "move with the veteran regardless of which EHR is being used" and urged VA to provide written testimony ahead of hearings. The panel heard testimony from VA officials and health‑information‑exchange and provider representatives about technical progress, persistent data gaps and workforce and contract pressures that the witnesses said limit full, reliable sharing between VA and community clinicians.

Why this matters: Veterans receive care both inside VA facilities and from community providers; roughly one‑third of VA care is delivered in the community, panelists said. Incomplete or hard‑to‑use records can delay diagnosis and duplicate testing, hampering clinicians' ability to deliver timely care, committee members said.

VA officials described recent work and concrete metrics. Dr. Jonathan Nebeker, VA's Chief Medical Information Informatics Officer, said Joint Longitudinal Viewer (JLV) users — more than 110,000 VA employees in January 2025 — opened about 2,200,000 community care documents that month. The Joint Health Information Exchange (JHE) connected to national…