The Department of Veterans Affairs is seeking a budget increase for healthcare services. A recent Government Accountability Office report reviewed how the agency allocates these funds, and uncovered ways they can perform better. Sharon Silas, director of health care for GAO, says that more recent data is needed for the analytic models they use to determine monetary needs.
“We found that the patient workload data that was being fed into the models, The Veterans Health Administration wasn’t using the most recently available data. Specifically, for fiscal year 2019, the data spanned from fiscal year 2013 up through 2017. It didn’t include data from 2018,” Silas said. “What we found there were 39 medical centers had experienced an increase of 3% in their work load, and identified another 9 medical centers that experienced a 3% decline in their workload. That information wasn’t part of that model’s output.”
