President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order on advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities spurred the Department of Veterans Affairs to develop its new 2022 Equity Action Plan, which outlines how the agency will combat historic inequities like racial and gender discrimination.
Over the past five years, VA has expanded programs for underserved communities, including reproductive health care and women’s services and data dashboarding techniques to better understand minority populations’ needs to ensure the agency is delivering equal access to services for all veterans…
“[VA is] trying to improve access for all of our veterans, get them access to high quality care and make sure that they achieve equitable health outcomes,” VA’s Executive Director of the Office of Health Equity Dr. Ernest Moy told GovCIO Media & Research in an interview.
VA’s Office of Health Equity will prioritize leveraging and analyzing veteran data to develop reports for specific populations to better understand underserved populations and identify gaps that still need to be filled in FY 2023. The office is using these insights to collaborate with the Veterans Health and Benefits arms, so the agency can deliver unified care.
“One of the things that we do is to try to raise awareness of issues of disparities among veterans and we put out lots of different kinds of products to the general public, to veterans, to providers, to VA policymakers, to external policymakers, to have them best understand the disparities that we do observe in our system,” Moy explained…
