The Government Accountability Office placed the Veterans Affairs Department’s healthcare system on a list of high-risk programs for 2015, saying at an April 29 Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing that the agency needs to address inadequate oversight and ambiguous policies.
“Risks to the timeliness, costeffectiveness, quality and safety of veterans’ healthcare, along with other persistent weaknesses GAO and others have identified in recent years, raised serious concerns about VA’s management and oversight of its healthcare system,” said GAO Healthcare Director Debra Draper at the hearing.
GAO prepared testimony (pdf) says VA operates one of the largest healthcare delivery systems in the nation, including 150 medical centers and more than 800 community-based outpatient clinics.
Enrollment in the VA healthcare system has grown significantly, increasing from 6.8 to 8.9 million veterans between fiscal years 2002 and 2013, GAO says.
Over this same period, Congress has provided steady increases in VA’s healthcare budget, increasing from $23.0 billion to $55.5 billion.
At the hearing Draper outlined five major areas that put the VA at risk of failing to provide adequate healthcare to veterans including ambiguous policies and inconsistent processes, inadequate oversight and accountability, information technology challenges, inadequate training for VA staff and unclear resource needs and allocation priorities.
John Daigh, the VA’s assistant inspector general, agreed with Draper’s assessment of the Veterans Health Administration.
“VHA is at risk of not performing its mission as the result of several intersecting factors,” Deigh said. “VHA has several missions, and too often management decisions compromise the most important mission of providing veterans with quality healthcare.”
Daigh focused on the Veterans Integrated Service Networks – regional offices that are set up to oversees VA medical centers in certain areas – saying the current VISN structure has not worked effectively to support and solve problems facing hospitals.
One role of the VISNs is to make sure medical providers at each facility are doing their job properly with periodic reviews.
Daigh said in prepared testimony (pdf) that a forthcoming VA OIG report found that in hospitals where there are specialty units with small numbers of providers, it is difficult to obtain unbiased peer reviews of clinical cases and assessments of clinical performance by peers.
That lack of data makes it difficult for VISN’ to accurately assess medical care providers. But medical centers shouldn’t be shouldering all of the blame, Daigh said.
“The VISN structure has been inconsistently effective in addressing this issue,” he said.
Each VISN has a different internal organization and each medical facility has a different internal structure.
“This lack of standardization makes the dissemination of information and policy to facilities challenging and the acquisition of critical data from facilities more difficult,” Daigh said.
For more:
– go to the hearing page (webcast and prepared testimony available)
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