1971: VRI develops "VECTOR" models and receives substantial funding to build these models. It begins the long-term use of VECTOR models for analyses.

1972: Willow Run Laboratories spins off from the University of Michigan and is renamed the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (ERIM). William M. Brown is ERIM's first president.

1972: VRI enters the health sector. A National Institutes of Health contract creates an inventory of "health manpower" models, and catalogs their contributions to health services research. VRI wins its first health project for the analysis of national nursing policies.

1976: ERIM begins using its image processing expertise for medical purposes with the development of morphological operators for doing shape-based pattern recognition, along with a special-purpose parallel computer, the Cytocomputer™, to perform these operations in real time.

1976: VRI gets its first military health contract, specifically a contract with the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) for Health Affairs to develop a method for allocating beneficiary populations to military health facilities (i.e., the catchment area directory) and model their demand for services from these facilities. This model is now known as the Managed Care Forecasting and Analysis System.

1979: The first VRI military contract exceeds $1 million and fosters the rapid growth of VRI Health Care Practice. This is a contract with OSD Health Affairs to create an integrated database called the Defense Medical Information System (DMIS), which maintained data on military beneficiary population demographics, military facilities, and the consumption of direct (through military facilities) and contracted (provided through civilian facilities) health care.