The Department of Veterans Affairs stopped providing information on hospital performance this summer in violation of laws passed after the wait time scandal in 2014.
The VA is required to provide data on wait times, death and readmission rates, and surveys of patient experiences at veterans’ hospitals to Hospital Compare, a website run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The VA stopped sending that data on July 1, USA Today confirmed Monday.
“VA’s lack of transparency is infuriating, but it’s not at all surprising, as this isn’t the first time VA has chosen to ignore a law designed to improve VA’s performance and help veterans and taxpayers,” Rep. Jeff Miller, chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an email.
“But the key question in all of this is, ‘what is VA trying to hide by refusing to make this info public?,’” Miller said.
Congress mandated that VA send reports to Hospital Compare, which provides patients with information on how individual hospitals are doing, after the wait times scandal at VA hospitals around the country in 2014. (RELATED: Gov’t Watchdog Report Shows Veterans STILL Wait A Long Time For Health Care)
The VA must make “information needed to make VA medical center patient quality and outcome information publicly available through HHS’s Hospital Compare website” under the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014. The law specifies that VA report “measures of timely and effective health care” and “survey data of patient experiences,” among other things, to the website. (RELATED: Veterans Group Invites Vets To Tell Their VA Horror Stories)
The website the VA and HHS set up to provide that information, www.hospitalcompare.va.gov, is currently completely blank.
VA lawyers recommended the site be taken down until the VA could work out a new agreement for the website, according to Joe Francis, director of clinical analytics and reporting at the Veterans Health Administration.
The website didn’t meet accessibility requirements, Frances told USA Today. For instance, some of the comparisons were indicated by colors, making it difficult to decipher for colorblind folks.
The VA still has many raw spreadsheets with data on wait times, readmission and death statistics, but those reports do not compare veterans’ hospitals to non-VA hospitals.
“I’m not defending what we have currently in terms of our reporting site,” Francis said. “It is not a user-friendly interface by any means, but that site at least met the [accessibility] requirements,” Francis said.
Since the website is CMS, the VA needs to work out a new way to report the data. “We are working closely with the VA to finalize an inter-agency agreement and expect to sign the final agreement very shortly,” Albright said.
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