VA Taps Aptive to Strengthen Clinical Informatics for Veterans

Aptive has received a five-year blanket purchase agreement with a $500M ceiling to provide clinical informatics support for the Veterans Health Administration’s (VHA) Office of Clinical Informatics (OCI), part of VHA’s Digital Health Office. OCI sets the informatics standards, tools and processes that shape clinical care across VA’s health system, which serves more than nine million enrolled Veterans.

The work covers Federal electronic health record sustainment and support for VHA’s EHR modernization, which has 13 deployments planned in 2026, along with VistA/CPRS configuration, multi-tier issue management, clinical workflow management, clinical decision support (CDS), informatics patient safety and informatics workforce stewardship. The contract team, led by a board-certified clinical informatics physician and including health IT informatics analysts, human factors engineers and change management specialists, will help keep clinical systems reliable and safe while VA modernizes.

“Moving a health system to a new EHR while keeping the current one running is incredibly complex,” said Rachele Cooper, Chief Executive Officer at Aptive. “VA is doing it at national scale for millions of Veterans, and it needs partners who understand both sides of that transition. That’s exactly the team and skillsets we bring to the table.”

The OIP model organizes work under the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), with quarterly planning sessions where VA business owners and contractor teams set priorities together. Instead of a fixed staffing plan, the team will scope each quarter’s work, match the right mix of clinical, technical and human factors skills to it and measure the value each feature delivers. The team works across both VistA/CPRS and Oracle Health, so legacy systems stay stable while new ones come online, and it can stand up off-cycle support when urgent needs arise.

“Clinicians notice informatics when it gets in their way of caring for Veterans,” said Dr. Adi Gundlapalli, Chief Medical Officer at Aptive. “An alert that fires at the wrong moment during emergency procedures or an order set that doesn’t match the actual workflow takes time away from patients. Our job is to get those details right so the system supports direct patient care and clinical judgment instead of competing with those priorities.”

Health systems nationwide are modernizing clinical technology without pausing patient care, and informatics teams, working in the background, are what keep clinicians productive and patients safe through that change. For Aptive, the award deepens its clinical informatics work with VA and gives it a direct role in one of the department’s most important modernization priorities. This BPA falls within the Integrated Healthcare Transformation 2.0 (IHT 2.0) Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract, under which Arrow ARC and partners support VHA across health system transformation, implementation and operations, informatics and business services. Arrow ARC is a joint venture between Aptive and Artemis ARC, bringing an agile, mission-first mindset and a strong track record of delivering practical, high-impact solutions across the federal health sector.