GAO has found that staff at six VA medical centers did not consistently follow VA’s credentialing and privileging policy requirements.
Following up on an inspector general report that revealed problems with staffing, organizational structures, and poor communication at the Marion, Ohio VAMC, GAO said it did not find problems at six other centers it visited comparable to those reported by investigators at the Marion VAMC. Nine patients are said to have died due to poor medical care at the Marion center in 2007.
According to GAO-10-26, VA made policy changes in response to the initial findings to allow VAMCs to collect more complete and timely information on physician licensure, malpractice, and disciplinary actions.
GAO selected requirements that must be verified each time a physician goes through the credentialing process and must be recorded in VA’s online credentialing database and found that 29 of the 180 credentialing and privileging files it reviewed lacked proper verification of state medical licensure.
In addition, the VAMCs did not identify instances when physicians appeared to have omitted required information on their applications, GAO said.
It said departmental policies lacked sufficient internal controls, such as specifying how compliance should be assessed, to identify and correct problems with VAMCs’ noncompliance with credentialing and privileging policies.