“… In April 2019, Gfrerer assured a panel of suspicious lawmakers that one key piece of technology — the Decision Support Tool associated with the community care benefits of the MISSION Act — would be up and running on the go-live date specified in the legislation.
The Decision Support Tool, Gfrerer explained, was “developed by clinicians for clinicians” and is designed to pull together data from multiple legacy VA systems to help navigate and parse the complicated drive-time and wait-time requirements and specialty needs that determine whether a veteran qualifies for community care under the new law…”
“Also under the MISSION Act, VA plans to aggressively track opioid prescriptions to veterans as part of a drug monitoring program. That program is designed to give VA clinicians visibility into the prescriptions veterans receive outside the VA system, including those from the Defense Department’s TRICARE program as well as through commercial and community health systems…”
“Information technology at VA is a little different. Not only is the CIO nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, but OI&T has its own budget line (about $5.4 billion in 2019) and is charged with serving all the organizations inside VA — health, benefits and cemeteries.”
“When you look at the efficiency and opportunity to create a much better infrastructure for IT service across the department, it’s much better to have a centralized program that services the entire enterprise,” Gfrerer said. “We put enterprise in everything we do.”
“Gfrerer offered the example of a robotics process automation solution for a mail intake program at one of the VA’s big administrative departments…” Read the full article here.
Source: VA’s pivot to agile – November 8, 2019. FCW.
