Hagel promises solution in 30 days
We’ve all been a victim of the VA’s inability to share records with the Department of Defense what with them sending paper back and forth, records getting lost, having to submit copies of our records repeatedly, having blood tests and examinations again and again. Chuck Hagel the new Secretary of Defense promised members of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs that he would have a solution for them in 30 days and have it operational by the end of the year, says the Stars & Stripes;
Hagel said he couldn’t defend DOD’s past performance on records sharing. In recent days, he said, he has stopped further spending on the process and has restructured program oversight. A plan would be forthcoming soon, he said.
“I want it to work, and until I get my arms around this, I’m not going to spend any more money on this,” Hagel said. “We will have it shortly. Can I tell you in a week or two? We will have something decided within 30 days, I’ll tell you that. I can’t defend it.”
Of course, if it does happen within the time limits that Hagel has promised, there’s still a leadership problem in the Veterans’ Affairs Department that must be dealt with sooner rather than later, because transmitting files is only a small portion of the problems that cause veterans to wait years, sometimes, for the treatment that they need and earned. You can bet that if there were delays like this for Medicare recipients, something would have been done sooner.
Category: Veterans' Affairs Department
30 days?
What? Hagel suddenly got all those Government Civilians reclassed as “At Will” ???
Hagel: it’s white-out, not coke on your computer screen.
Bureaucracy 101, Chapter 1, Section 1, Rule 2:
NEVER state on the record that a recognized problem or deficiency can be solved or cured within a specific number of hours, days, weeks, months, or years. If pressed for a specific date or timeframe, quadruple whatever number you think that finding the solution or cure will actually take. If possible, provide a date or timeframe that falls after your retirement.
For the curious:
Bureaucracy 101, Chapter 1, Section 1, Rule 1:
Preserve your job at any cost and, concomittantly, expand your realm.
Ya right 30 Days, I have been waiting on a decision for over 470 days right now, totally unacceptable !
Hagel has little experience administering a large bureaucracy in gov’t or private industry, and now he’s in command of the largest one on the planet. 30 days? Yeah, whatever. Maybe Marty can conjure up a magic solution…whenever he crawls out from under the SECDEF’s desk.
OH, JOY!!! A politician has promised that he’ll fix everything, now I know everything will be OK!! NOT!! The only safe assumption I see about this barrel of effluvia is that this promise will go the same direction as B. Hussein 0bama’s promise to halve the Nation’s deficit within four years!
MSGRetired: DoD has only a small piece of the VA rating process – e.g., getting your military medical records to the VA. It’s the VA that takes things from there.
I don’t think you even get scheduled for any VA rating medical evals until they have your medical records from DoD. I could be wrong about that, though.
As far as fixing this: hell, I can give DoD an interim solution – not perfect, but workable for the short term – off the top of my head:
1. Print/scan a Soldier/Sailor/Airman/Marine’s (SSAM’s) medical records to PDF.
2. Digitally sign same.
3. Burn 3 copies to CD/DVD.
4. Give 1 copy to SSAM; send 1 copy to VA; place 1 copy in 90 day suspense file.
5. Send VA copy via Certified Mail to appropriate office at VA, w/letter of transmittal and return receipt.
6. Follow-up at 90 days on any medical records not acknowledged by VA. If not received, duplicate suspense-file CD/DVD and resend to VA. Put back in suspense file with new 90-day suspense.
7. Repeat step 6 until receipt of records acknowledged by VA.
A longer-term solution requires the DoD and VA to agree on a medical records interchange format, build their parts of the system (DoD pitching, VA catching), test them, then put them in operation. That seems to be basically BD at present, and IMO getting that back on track will take quite a bit longer than 30 days.
Still: give Hagel props for figuring out that continuing to work on something that’s essentially BD and needs reevalutaion from square one is a bad idea.
#7 Hondo: on the technical solution, there also has to be a culture change. The VA decentralized configuration control, allowing each major VAMC/VISN to have its own control. The VA needs to centralize configuration management, and then it can establish a single standard for data.
If they start today at documenting the As-Is, it will take 3 years to develop an effective Change Management process to control data transfers between DoD and VA.
From USAJobs.opm.gov, the VA is funding positions at different sites to attack the CM problem, but it is still decentralized so the problem won’t get fixed.
There are other ways of fixing the problem, but these are more cultural solutions (regional vs nation-wide mobility) than technical.
Slightly off-topic: the medical records need to be two-way: we have a habit of recalling retirees to AD.
Hmmm. Withholding judgement for 30 days or so, but he has my attention by at least admitting there is a problem and that it must be rectified yesterday.
DaveO: generally agree. Might be able to implement CM in 2yrs or so, but 3 sounds about right.
Solution I propose is short-term/interim. Plus is it will get a scanned. electronic version to the VA for their use, plus give a verifiable (signed) copy to the SSAM for his record in the future. Minus is that unless the PDF is electronically-produced from a database it will likely not be importable without serious work, and probably isn’t the best long-term solution anyway.
Best long-term solution is a secure EDI link between VA and DoD to transfer Med Records for those separating/retiring. That will take a bit of time to design and implement. IMO some amount of culture change may be required on both sides during design/implementation in order for implementation to be successful.
I still think that hiring retired E-8&9s would be the best way to to correct the personnel work ethnic. The Tops would learn the union rules and cull the herd (decrease the vet’s waiting time. A Top who could bonuses each his department became better and faster . Think the Top would be removing the dead wood from his staff? The VA way from 41 yrs of dealing with them is IF IT is Working Smoothly and in a timely manner. Change the progam back to DEAD SLOW crawl.
#10 Hondo: Generally agree. Think another long-term solution to be had is combining all fixed medical sites, personnel and funding (DoD, VA) and putting them under C2 of the Uniformed Health Services branch. Take military medicine, and everything that goes with it, away from the military. Leave medics and corpsmen with the services, but all the rest of the medical specialties, admin, and IT elsewhere is a good solution.
The uniformed and suited brass have been hiding behind AFGE, AFSCME, and institutional inertia – so take it away along with the money.
The shitstorm alone is worth the price of popcorn.
DaveO: UHS, as in that part of the Public Health Service? Um, don’t think that’s a particularly good idea, amigo. That’s getting a third bureaucracy involved. A third bureaucracy means 3x the coordination work to get a damn thing done. Further, the PHS is part of HHS – a department that IMO has a piss-poor record of doing much of anything except handing out cash (and not a very good record of doing that). At least the VA makes some pretense at having screening standards.
If you want to modify that to read “purple suit” DoD medicine at the base/post/camp/station level (e.g., all of the non-tactical stuff) and make it a separate Defense agency – the Defense Medical Support Agency, or something similar – you might have something. I’ve wondered since the early 1980s why we weren’t doing that for Med/Dental/Log/Comms-IT at the base/post/camp/station level.
#7 Hondo, they have all my records, I went to see their doctors last October so they could verify everything, not sure why my Retirement Physical wasnt good enough. So at this point 6 months since the doctors saw me at the VA and Nadda !!
#11 Joe, I wouldn’t last 2 seconds dealing with Civilians and Unions.
Nothing will change for the good at the VA as long as the feckless Eric Shinseki is in charge.
My Walter Reed surgeon for my prostate cancer was the head of DOD Prostate Cancer Center (or a name close to that). He personally did the prostate surgery on folks like Bob Dole, Ted Stevens, Colin Powell, etc. His wall was full of pictures of movers and shakers (he didn’t ask for mine).
Yet, not good enough for VA. I had to see a quack in a shopping center strip mall outside the main gate at Cherry Point MCAS.
Tic toc, Chuck. 16 days left.
Well, I guess it’s a good thing I went over to Lovell Center and got a new ID card and all the rest of the stuff that went with it in December 2009. I got the booklet explaining my benefits last summer, a mere 2.5 years later.
I have it in a plastic ziploc bag, in case we get a flood and I need it.
DoD/DVA can’t come up with an appropriate concerned facial expression in less than 90 days, Jonn. But I appreciate your optimism.
15 days to go, Chuck.
You didn’t add ‘doom on you, doom on you’.