Improving Access to External VA Care through Enhanced Scheduling Technology
House Subcommittee on Technology Modernization
2025-05-05
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Source: Congress.gov
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Transcript
Mic check 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Mic, mic check. Mic check 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Mic check 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Today, Monday, what is it, May, I forgot, 5th. Witness, okay, thank you. My check one, two. Quarter of. It's going to be hard to get a shot of camera three right now.
All right, good afternoon. The subcommittee on technology modernization will come to order. And appreciate everybody who is here today. Appreciate our witnesses for being here and to the members that are here today for this committee hearing. Purpose of today's hearing is about scheduling and what goes on at the VA for community care and access to that for our veterans, which is certainly a growing need that is taking place out there to make things more convenient and more conducive to veterans where they are and where they live. When veterans are referred to community care, the scheduling process should be simple, fast, and focused on their health care and getting them through in a timely and efficient manner. But for too long, that has not been the case. And it's been something that has been fraught with inefficiencies, challenges, and a back and forth between veterans, the VA, and ultimately the community care partner where they're receiving their care. To schedule an appointment, VA staff must pick up the phone again and again, often calling the veteran and the provider multiple times to schedule an appointment. It's a tedious manual multi-step process that can stretch over hours into weeks, delaying care for the men and women who earned it. It's inefficient and unsustainable. Community care is VA care and will remain a critical component of effectively delivering veteran health care. Approximately 2.8 million veterans used community care in 2023 alone, and the outdated telephone model for scheduling these appointments is being crushed by the volume of requests from veterans for health care in their communities. VA's External Provider in Scheduling, or EPS, is supposed to fix that, and in many ways it is fixing it. EPS eliminates a large portion of the time and labor-intensive aspects of community care scheduling by giving VA schedulers direct access to providers' appointment availability, allowing them to directly interface with them to schedule their appointments. Through EPS, providers agree to share their scheduling grids with VA and allow VA schedulers to search and sort appointments by distance, drive time, availability, and more.
Available community care appointments on one screen, a VA scheduler can book the appointment directly with a community care provider with just one call to the veteran. The average schedule for an appointment using EPS is seven minutes. Without having to rely on making multiple phone calls, some schedulers have been able to book up to four times as many appointments per day. Spending less time scheduling each appointment means VA schedulers can be more efficient and veterans can get their appointments faster. But here's the problem. EPS is only active at about 20% of VA medical hospitals. Some facilities have only had EPS for a few months. While the program is adding new providers almost every day, there are roughly 6,000 provider services currently active in EPS, and that number will need to keep growing if the program is going to reach its potential. Provider participation is absolutely critical. EPS is only a few years old and I understand that it takes time to adopt new technology and certainly we've had issues of healthcare delivery since the pandemic that have complicated rollouts and technology modernization and all kinds of things. But with strong leadership and a commitment from the VA, I fear that this will be yet another IT project that withers on the vine with unrealized potential to improve veterans' lives. Without strong leadership, that could be the outcome. Despite EPS's promising results, the Biden administration repeatedly placed roadblocks in front of the program. In 2024, VA paused recruitment of community providers into EPS, deactivated sites where EPS was already up and running, and canceled plans to expand nationwide, all while blaming fake budget shortfalls. Turning off EPS at active sites doesn't just hurt veterans. It burns bridges with the community providers who may not trust VA to follow through again later. Technology works, and this subcommittee is not going to allow VA bureaucracy to stand in the way of its own success. As the demand for community care continues to grow, VA can't afford to continue scheduling millions of appointments over the phone.
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