The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is working to modernize its appointment scheduling systems, but a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reveals that the VA lacks a comprehensive schedule and plan to deliver on the new system requirements.
In the June 23 report, GAO said that the VA uses dozens of systems to support appointment scheduling for tens of millions of health care appointments for veterans each year.
For example, there are VA medical facilities with the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) health information system that use several VistA applications to schedule health care appointments.
There are also facilities using Oracle Health’s new Federal Electronic Health Record (EHR) system – which aims to replace the outdated VistA system as part of the VA’s Electronic Health Records Modernization program – that have another set of scheduling systems, as well as some of the same systems VistA facilities use for scheduling appointments.
VA also has systems that veterans can use for their appointments – such as online portals – and systems it uses to calculate wait times. In addition, nine VA medical facilities have purchased or developed additional systems to meet their scheduling needs.
“VA schedulers experience challenges navigating VA’s complex systems environment, while veterans experience challenges with online scheduling,” the report says.
To address these challenges, the VA’s Veteran Health Administration (VHA) and Office of Information and Technology (OIT) are working together to modernize systems. However, GAO said that the VA has only partially met key practices in the areas of project scheduling and requirements management.
“Specifically, VA’s project schedule substantially met two elements of a reliable schedule and partially met two others. For example, it does not include all IT work needed for the effort, which limits VA’s ability to ensure VHA and OIT agree on what work needs to be completed and when,” GAO explained in the report.
“VA implemented three of six key practices for effectively managing requirements, and partially implemented three,” it adds. “For example, VA has not fully developed a requirements management plan and does not fully monitor and control requirements by maintaining bi-directional traceability between them and the deliverables.”
GAO is making two recommendations to the VA to develop a schedule that meets best practices and to fully implement key requirements development and management practices. VA concurred with both recommendations.
The VA said its target completion date for the two recommendations is December 2025.