The VA is increasingly relying on contractors to conduct medical exams on veterans applying for disability benefits but has only “limited information” on how those contractors are meeting quality and timeliness goals, GAO has said.
The share of such exams conducted by contractors, as opposed to the VA’s own personnel, has increased steadily in recent years as the department has worked to reduce the backlog; contractors now account for about half of such exams. However, for the first half of 2017, the “vast majority” of contractors’ quality scores fell below the target of 92 percent of exam reports with no errors.
Further, the tracking system used by the VA’s Veterans Benefits Administration until the spring of this year did not always retain the completion date of the initial exam, which is used to determine timeliness. The new system provides more detail but the VA “has not documented how it will ensure the data are accurate or how it will use the data to track the timeliness and billing of corrected exam reports,” GAO said. Timeliness data is “needed to determine if VBA should reduce payment to a contractor,” it added.
Also, while a third-party auditor verifies that contracted examiners have valid medical licenses, the VBA “does not verify if examiners have completed training nor does it collect information to assess training effectiveness in preparing examiners. While VBA plans to improve monitoring of training, it has not documented plans for tracking or collecting information to assess training.”
The report said the VBA agreed with its recommendations to develop a plan for using its new data system to monitor contractors’ quality and timeliness performance, analyze overall program performance, verify that contracted examiners complete required training, and collect information to assess the effectiveness of that training.
