WASHINGTON – Sen. Chuck Grassley signed on as a co-sponsor of a bipartisan bill that would create a pilot program allowing veterans to schedule their own appointments for treatment using the internet. The Faster Care for Veterans Act (S. 3043) would test online appointment scheduling for VA medical appointments, including the Veterans Choice program.
“The VA made problems with scheduling worse by botching its rollout of the Veterans Choice program in routing all appointments for private providers through an outside vendor that couldn’t handle it,” Grassley said. “The VA acknowledged its mistake to me and pledged to fix it by bringing all scheduling back in-house. The VA ought to do everything possible to make scheduling as easy as possible for veterans. The option of being able to go online and search for available appointments is convenient and efficient. It can be done 24 hours a day, without sitting on the phone on hold or getting routed to another phone number. That’s a technology that’s used all over outside of the VA. Veterans should have the benefit of the most modern means of appointment scheduling.”
The pilot program through the Faster Care for Veterans Act would use a commercially available patient self-scheduling application that would be integrated with the VA’s existing scheduling software. The online scheduling option would apply both to appointments at VA facilities and with private doctors who participate in the Veterans Choice program. Many private health insurers use patient online self-scheduling, both for patient convenience and to help fill cancelled appointments more easily than those booked by phone. The ease of filling cancelled appointments means more patients can be served in a shorter time frame, a major consideration with a VA plagued by long appointment waiting times.
In March, the VA pledged to Grassley to fix its botched appointment scheduling problem that it created through implementing the Veterans Choice program. The promise came after Grassley wrote to the VA, citing examples of the extreme frustration conveyed to him from Iowa veterans facing difficulty seeing their preferred doctors and a bureaucratic nightmare of telephone holds and referrals simply to make a doctor’s appointment. The VA has been working to fix the problems it added to its appointment system in routing too many calls through a vendor that couldn’t handle them. The VA is in the process of selecting a new contractor to manage its network of private providers, but has pledged that under the new contract, all patient scheduling will once again be done in-house, as the Choice Act specified in the first place. The Faster Care for Veterans Act would go further by piloting a system that would work with the VA’s existing scheduling software to more efficiently find and fill available appointments while giving veterans more control.
The Faster Care for Veterans Act has a counterpart pending in the House of Representatives with significant co-sponsorship.
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