VSOs told GAO that veterans have had challenges requesting an appointment online and receiving confirmation. Image: Jennifer Vinciguerra/Shutterstock.com
The VA’s complex processes for scheduling veterans’ health care appointments “make scheduling difficult” for both the veterans and for VA’s schedulers, the GAO has said.
The department “has dozens of systems to support appointment scheduling for veterans” that it acquired over the years to address needs such as for online scheduling and virtual appointments, it said. The department also has “added more steps to processes, and introduced community care and virtual modalities. These factors have increased how long it takes to schedule appointments.”
It said for example that the environment “requires VA staff to open multiple applications to schedule a single appointment” which “may make schedulers inefficient or require workarounds that may vary across sites. In addition, schedulers must run many reports in different systems to identify veteran self-scheduled and self-canceled appointments and appointment requests.”
Further, schedulers must view provider availability across systems, “which has increased scheduling errors and overbooking,” it said.
Meanwhile, veterans’ service organizations told GAO that veterans “have experienced challenges requesting an appointment online and receiving confirmation once an appointment is scheduled” and dissatisfaction with the lag time before hearing back from VA staff.
The Veterans Health Administration and the VA’s central IT office are working to modernize the systems, it said, but the project schedule only partially meets two of the four standards for that effort and only substantially meets the other two, the GAO said. Similarly, the VA has fully implemented only three of the six key practices for effectively managing requirements while only partially implementing the other three.
For example, officials told the GAO that the department is working to standardize veteran appointment self-scheduling across the two main systems. “However, they said, the department has not yet determined how the modernized and updated products used for scheduling will interface and be used to pull and combine the data into a comprehensive report,” the GAO said.
It said the VA agreed with recommendations to develop a schedule that meets best practices and to fully implement key requirements development and management practices.
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