The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) warned that most Veterans Health Administration (VHA) facilities in a recent review lack basic data to track whether veterans’ specialty care calls are being answered, raising concerns about delays in access to care.
In a preliminary result advisory memorandum to VHA and VA’s Office of Information and Technology, the OIG said the department is not adequately tracking key call center performance metrics – including abandoned and answered calls and average wait times – for specialty care clinics.
“The OIG found that 13 of the 15 medical facilities in the team’s sample review did not have key data – such as the number of abandoned (calls where the caller hung up before anyone answered) and answered calls and average call wait times – making it difficult to determine whether veterans reached specialty care clinics quickly and easily,” the OIG said.
“The OIG is disseminating these findings to ensure all VHA medical facilities are aware of and can proactively start collecting and overseeing specialty care call data,” it added.
Specifically, the OIG said that leaders at those 13 facilities “had no oversight of call performance for 49 of their 78 clinics,” leaving almost 1 million veteran call attempts untracked.
Out of the nearly 1 million untracked calls at the 49 clinics, at least 338,000 were to radiology clinics and 109,000 to mental health clinics.
The OIG spoke to veterans who said they could not reach staff by phone to schedule or change their appointments, which forced them to drive to VA facilities in person.
Additionally, the OIG detailed the experience of a veteran’s spouse who attempted to schedule “a critical radiology appointment for her husband who required evaluation for cancer that may have spread.” According to the memo, she made multiple phone calls that went to voicemail and did not receive a response within the promised 24-hour timeframe.
“Because phone access is a primary way veterans schedule specialty care appointments, the absence of data needed to track call performance may impact VHA’s awareness of delays in veterans’ timely access to care, especially for high-risk patients needing mental health or radiology services,” the OIG said.
“Further, absent data may prevent leaders from identifying problems or taking corrective action to ensure timely, seamless care,” it added.
The OIG said its review is ongoing, and it will include a complete analysis of this finding and others in a final report.