The VA “might” call you back…
I love the Palo Alto VA Hospital. It’s free for me and full of whip-smart Stanford Med School Residents. But the VA system has a nationwide problem: there’s no online patient portal to manage communication. Instead, all the communication is by phone, which means that you call to make an appointment but leave a voicemail. When they call you back, it’s often from a different number, with or without Caller ID.
Many patients are my age or older, so we’re challenged by the logistics of all this back and forth. And everything else. Since it’s the VA, every message starts with ~40 seconds of advice on what to do if you’re feeling mental trauma or suicidal tendencies. It’s enough to make you want to shuffle off this mortal coil.
The waste of time and resources is obvious and many VA employees feel strongly about the problem.
Who could fix this?
Nava Public Benefit Corporation was formed to address these kinds of problems, starting with the small team of developers that self-organized to rescue healthcare.gov in 2013.
Atlantic Monthly: The Secret Startup That Saved the Worst Website in America The Atlantic · July 2015
One of Nava’s recent projects was to streamline the VA’s Benefits Appeals process by building CaseFlow, a big project without a clear model to serve as an example:
We not only designed and built a set of digital tools called Caseflow but also helped change an 85-year old policy:
- Fewer than five percent of cases processed with Caseflow Certification have data problems. Before, 41 percent of cases arriving at the Board of Veteran Appeals from regional offices had missing documents and 30 percent had data discrepancies.
- The requirement to fill out Form 8 — which we identified as a redundant and time-consuming source of data discrepancies — has been removed from regulations.
- In total, modernization efforts have reduced the backlog of Veterans waiting for an appeal by 50% in about one year.
As a result, Veterans and the civil servants who process their appeals for benefits get a more transparent and timely experience.
After all that experience, a VA patient portal might be straightforward for Nava, since so many health care system providers have built so many of them for the private sector. The time and money saved is enormous, but the lower wear and tear on veterans might be more important, a small compensation for the wage slaves of America’s aggressive diplomacy.
