“The Department of Veterans Affairs understands the importance of employee morale and engagement. The VA is dedicated to creating an ‘organizational culture in which all people inspire and support each other to deliver world-class services to Veterans and all their loved ones.'”
“The VA has made progress in recent years on this front, according to several employee surveys. These efforts are critical and must be continued, particularly those that equip VA staff with the tools to operationalize the agency’s policies, while supporting the best employee experience.”
“However, policies that cannot be realistically executed by VA employees become simple aspiration. They can also lead to a demoralized workforce, high burnout and increased turnover rates that impair the VA’s ability to achieve its mission and objectives. Thankfully, software powered by clinical and administrative business intelligence can help. Real-time technologies that allow proactive monitoring and timely action are increasingly commonplace in health care.”
When VA employees have to depend dashboards and reporting tools that rely on 24- to 48-hours old data, such as those that run off the VA’s corporate data warehouse, veterans can be at risk. All too often, when health care reporting tools are not real-time, staff members must comb through patient charts in the medical records system, looking for new information and issues.”
“This is an enormous task that is akin to trying to find needles in a haystack and are a setup for potential failure. Human-only approaches are not a good way to build a health care system, if the goal is the delivery of highly reliable care. No staff member can be perfect every day, no matter how committed they are to caring for their patients.”
“A recent inspector general’s report highlights this disconnect between aspirational policy and the reality of execution challenges at scale, despite the best efforts by VA employees…” Read the full article here.
Source: Real-time intelligent software can help the VA save lives – By David Laborde, September 22, 2021. GCN.
