While the Veterans Affairs Department’s transition to a new electronic health records platform consumes much of the conversation around IT modernization efforts, the agency also has been working on its problematic scheduling system, the issue that turned VA’s IT into national news five years ago.
VA has a history of deploying—or attempting to deploy—faulty scheduling systems. The issues came to a head in 2014 when a series of reports emerged showing at least 40 veterans died while waiting for care at one facility in Phoenix, Arizona and officials attempted to cover up issues by falsifying appointment records. VA IT officials promised a (relatively) quick fix by implementing a new system, though those efforts continually fell short.
“The appointment scheduling system is the VA IT system most badly in need of an overhaul. More so than the financial system, the claims-paying system or even the EHR,” Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., said during a hearing Thursday held by the House VA Subcommittee on Technology Modernization. “That was true five years ago when the secret waitlist scandal in Phoenix broke and, despite some incremental improvements to VistA, it’s still true today.”
Since that time, VA has developed and partially deployed two replacement systems. The first, the VistA Scheduling Enhancements, or VSE, program looked to build on the agency’s in-house system. Ultimately, the project was nothing more than a reskin of the existing scheduling system, according to VA Assistant Inspector General for Audits and Evaluations Larry Reinkemeyer, who said the agency merely replaced the user interface w ..
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