OPINION:
Veterans face a new enemy when it comes to health care: bureaucracy. Constrained by conflicting rules and procedures, the Department of Veterans Affairs pinches pennies at the expense of those who have served their country and deserve better treatment.
The law says every wounded veteran should receive care within a set period, but if no appointment is given, veterans can look outside the system for medical services. Yet the clock resets whenever the VA reschedules the appointment.
VA bureaucrats exploit loopholes like this to trap patients in the system because it is cheaper for the government. But that often leads to veterans and their families going without the services they earned.
If the VA and Department of Defense want to save money, it should come from the back office, not the doctor’s office. On this front, these agencies have stepped into the future with a centralized records management system that allows any doctor in the VA’s vast service network to access veterans’ medical records instantly, regardless of the procedure sought. It’s a great advance over paper forms and warehouses filled with filing cabinets.
A project of this scale should have gone to the private sector from day one, but Defense Department and VA bureaucrats refused to cede any turf — until they tried themselves and failed.
Eventually, the project to build a cloud-based data warehouse of veterans’ vital medical information was handed off to contractors. Earlier this month, a single, standard federal electronic health record across both Cabinet departments and all military service branches was unveiled at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in Chicago, an integrated space offering assistance to nearly 90,000 veterans and active-duty personnel.
The new system establishes a definitive record of care that begins the moment a service member puts on the uniform. That record follows patients wherever they seek care from their days on active duty through their years at the VA. The setup will reduce costs and streamline coding, thus preventing errors in treatment.
By putting patients at the center of their profiles, the emphasis shifts from institutions and providers to patients. That’s the way it should be. The old system relied on multiple systems in different locations that didn’t sync, making health care for veterans inefficient, costly and dangerous.
The bugs are still being worked out, but involving the private sector means problems can be addressed quickly without battling red tape and crashing through walls of bureaucratic inertia to get anything done.
Anxious lawmakers, however, are overreacting to early flaws as an excuse to scrap the whole idea. They’d like to go back to the old, comfortable way of doing things. So would the bureaucrats. But the project deserves time to mature. The benefits far outweigh the risks of mistakes that will be worked out over time.
Technology is transforming health care, boosting productivity for the benefit of our veterans, whose concerns should always be at the top of the agenda. They did their best for us. We should provide the best for them.
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