The Veterans Affairs Department kicked off the rollout of a new patient-appointment scheduling tool at the VA Central Ohio Healthcare System Aug. 21, with high hopes that it will streamline veterans’ and medical providers’ experiences as it gets deployed enterprisewide in the coming years.
The launch of the resource—deemed the Centralized Scheduling Solution, or CSS—is considered by those involved to be both a major milestone and crucial component of the agency’s weighty, ongoing electronic health record modernization effort to leverage a unified commercial system with the Pentagon.
“Even during COVID we’re continuing to provide world-class care, but we’re also continuing to modernize,” VA’s Acting Deputy Secretary Pam Powers told Nextgov Tuesday, adding that CSS is “really going to make a big impact on our providers and the efficiency, but also for our veterans and the service that they get.”
Powers and three other agency officials playing key roles in the endeavor briefed Nextgov on the nascent tool’s evolution and functionality, what’s to come, and why the agency ditched a prior scheduling system development pursuit to set up CSS with Cerner Corp., the vendor steering VA’s in-production revamp of its electronic health record system.
Pivoting to Resource-Based Scheduling
When scheduling appointments using current means, VA personnel must engage in a time-consuming process that requires manual data entries and logging into separate software applications to coordinate calendars, clinicians, rooms and equipment. In that process’ place, CSS will provide a systemwide, “all-in-one” capability that incorporates straightforward color-coded time slots and what Chief Medical Officer of VA’s Electronic Health Record Modernization Office Dr. Laura Kroupa called “a resource-based” approach to scheduling.
“It really brings together the provider, the patient, the nurse, the room—all the resources that are needed to take care of a veteran—into one place, so that they can all be scheduled at one time,” Kroupa said. “And that allows the medical centers to really take the best advantage of the time and space that they have, so that there’s no time wasted between appointments, so that there are not multiple clinics looking to find an open space for a veteran—you can see the entire structure in one view, and bring all those resources together so the veteran can get their care in a timely way.”
Kroupa added that CSS also integrates to send telephone reminders to veterans regarding their appointment timing and interfaces with VA’s kiosks that patients use to check-in. Further, the product provides what Kroupa said is essentially a “one-click” way to schedule video visits—a much-needed capability amid the ongoing pandemic.
“We’re doing much more telehealth than we’ve done before,” Kroupa explained. “So being able to schedule those more quickly and easily is very important.”
VA has had a long and a sometimes rough history deploying scheduling systems, but it all culminated to garner nationwide attention in 2014 when reports surfaced that a “secret” waitlist of more than 1,400 veterans waiting months for treatment was being kept by the Phoenix VA Health Care System—and 40 on the list died while holding out for care.
Following the crisis, the agency set in motion the VistA Scheduling Enhancements, or VSE, program to boost its in-house system. Officials deemed the work did not effectively confront underlying issues and it was canceled, prompting the agency to turn to installing the Medical Appointment Scheduling System, or MASS. The commercial system was developed by Epic and a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin and saw an early deployment at the Chalmers P. Wylie Ambulatory Care Center in Columbus, Ohio. But that contract for MASS was canceled in January, opening the door for the launch of Cerner’s scheduling software solution—as insiders say they recognized the…
Read More: VA Launches New Patient Scheduling Tool as Part of Records Modernization Project