Originally posted by govtech.com in September 2025
Paper charts are quickly becoming a thing of the past in prison infirmaries across the South. In Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia, corrections officials are swapping clipboards for keyboards, bringing in electronic health record systems (EHR) to make it easier for doctors and nurses to look up patient histories and spot health issues sooner.
In Richmond, that shift is taking shape with the Virginia Department of Corrections’ (VADOC) full rollout of DOCHealth, a new EHR system designed for the state’s incarcerated population. The system first went live in women’s facilities in November; this month, VADOC completed its statewide expansion to men’s facilities.
That rollout comes at a time when the scale of Virginia’s correctional health system is enormous, serving tens of thousands of inmates with a wide range of medical needs.
“We have about between 23,000 and 26,000 inmates, depending on the time. And we have about 1,200 health-care staff out in the field, 43 facilities. So it’s kind of like managing a small town,” Steve Herrick, VADOC deputy director of Health Services, said.
A recent news release called the DOCHealth launch “a transformative moment” in correctional health care. The system provides improved continuity of care through comprehensive medical histories and real-time access to critical health information, with the enhanced ability to track chronic conditions and treatment compliance.
Achieving that level of care, however, was far from immediate. Building DOCHealth took more than a decade of careful planning.
“Our journey started over 10 years ago. Through multiple iterations, we landed with NaphCare as our chosen vendor, utilizing their TechCare Electronic Health Record product, which we have rebranded as DOCHealth,” Herrick said.
Additional support came from Wize Solutions for business process documentation, quality assurance and data migration according to Herrick — a critical piece in bringing the project together.
That groundwork was essential not just for functionality but for security. The system has a direct interface with the state’s current offender management system and also connects to the Virginia Immunization Information System. Access is “controlled through Active Directory and Okta,” according to Russell Murphey, VADOC director of health IT, with all data encrypted and all personnel required to complete Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) training before accessing the system.
Even with thorough planning, rolling out the system wasn’t simple. Training posed a challenge, particularly given the department’s lean staffing, VADOC officials said. Meagan Sok, assistant deputy director of VADOC Health Services, said the key to a smooth rollout was starting training well before the system went live.
“We made sure to do training actively early on and not just all at the end. We have 1,200 employees, so we need a lot of super users. We have a lot of facilities, and doing training throughout the months before ‘go live’ instead of just right at ‘go live’ helped us be able to get more people trained,” she said.
To measure the success of the EHR system and influence future updates, Herrick said VADOC plans to track patient care and operational improvements by developing reports from the EHR. These reports, created in partnership with NaphCare, will monitor diagnoses, health-care trends and key indicators — such as A1C for diabetics and vital signs — especially for chronic diseases, helping the department better track outcomes across the system.
Virginia’s move toward digital health care is part of a broader trend. Just across the border, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services rolled out an Epic-powered EHR in August, at all 13 state-operated health-care facilities. At Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro, its CEO Timothy Miller emphasized the human impact of the change. “By implementing electronic health records,” Miller said in a statement, “our staff can spend less time on paperwork and more time focusing on what matters most — caring for our patients.”
Meanwhile, the Georgia Department of Corrections implemented NaphCare’s TechCare 5.0 across 62 correctional facilities in just nine months, it announced in August. The system now manages records for more than 41,000 patients, with the goal of “improving documentation and reporting, and enabling health staff to dedicate more time to direct patient care.”
