VA eHMP

eHMP was a multi-stage program to renew the interface of the electronic health record (EHR) and the practitioner workspace used across Veterans Affairs facilities. The system it replaced, CPRS, had kept veterans safe for years, but it presented as grey on grey, every element the same weight, information density with no hierarchy to navigate it by.

Twelve hours is the whole specification

The stated opportunity, make the application "less heavy on the eyes," sat on the backlog beside routine feature requests, and read like styling. But a clinician on the eleventh hour of a shift is not glancing at a chart; they are extracting lab values, dosages, and allergies from a dense display with fatigued eyes. Reframed as a patient-safety argument, the requirement stopped being negotiable in the later months of the schedule.

Pragmatism over a bespoke design language

The constraint was under a year to modernize an entire EHR, compliant with HIPAA and Section 508 accessibility. A ground-up visual language built from color theory would have been the more satisfying artifact and the wrong use of the time. An established UI kit was adopted and adapted instead, so the year could be spent on legibility and hierarchy rather than on tokens, a deliberate, ego-free trade in service of the users.

A workspace, a search, and a chart that bends

A practitioner starting a shift needs one question answered first: what does today look like? The provider workspace was built to answer it: tasks, patient-journey progress, quick patient access, and shortcuts into the rest of the platform. Search was tuned to find and open the correct veteran quickly. And because a cardiology patient and a mental-health patient do not need the same screen, the chart was designed to adapt to the patient rather than force one fixed layout.