US

Years After Scandal, Phoenix VA Still Manipulating Vet Wait Lists

REUTERS

Daily Caller News Foundation logo
Luke Rosiak Investigative Reporter
Font Size:

Employees of the infamous Phoenix VA hospital continue to manipulate wait-time data to make it appear patients are treated promptly, and some of them are still dying unnecessarily as a result.

The new inspector general (IG) report makes clear that little has changed in the problems that made the Phoenix facility ground zero in the scandal that triggered the resignation of a VA secretary. It sparked promises in the White House of wholesale reforms at VA and a change in the department’s seriously dysfunctional management culture.

The IG report’s account of continuing problems at Phoenix was confirmed by the hospital’s chief of specialty care, who told The Daily Caller News Foundation he had reported hundreds of examples of appointments being wrongfully canceled to the hospital’s director, but nothing changed.

The report released Tuesday reviewed 2015 records and, “determined that untimely care from PVAHCS (the Phoenix hospital) may have contributed to the death of 1 patient” who “never received an appointment for a cardiology exam that could have prompted further definitive testing and interventions that could have forestalled his death.”

The review looked at patients who were waiting for appointments when they died, and appointments that were mysteriously cancelled. Most of the deaths were unrelated to slow care, it found, but the cancellations were a widespread violation of VA policy.

“In 2015, PVAHCS staff inappropriately discontinued consults,” it said. “We analyzed 30 consults canceled from January through March 2015, and found that the Chiropractic Service staff responsible for scheduling inappropriately canceled all 30.”

Another IG report released last week found that a second Phoenix patient died because the VA kept him waiting for treatment for lung cancer after it was diagnosed.

Phoenix VA’s Chief of Specialty Care Clinics Kuauhtemoc Rodriguez told TheDCNF that, “as for scheduling of appointments, primary care has deleted at least 1,600 that I’m aware of, that were reported to Ms. Deborah Amdur and the associate and deputy facility director.” Amdur was then the facility’s director.

“I personally handed her a deleted list of 300 patients who were removed by primary care supervisors in order to meet national metrics. There are people who are supervisors in primary care still today who ran the secret wait-lists. Not one of them has been punished,” Rodriquez said.

The VA chose Amdur to help the hospital recover from the scandal the same month a previous IG report revealed extensive evidence that she had overseen data manipulation in her last job. Amdur resigned from the Phoenix job unexpectedly after only a few months, and VA replaced her with another director with a flawed record.

Tuesday’s IG report said appointments were canceled either with no explanation, after making inadequate attempts to contact the patient, or because of paperwork errors. By canceling appointments, workers were able to give the impression that not as many people were waiting for care.

“As of July 2016 … the facility had nearly 38,000 total open consults” because “staff had not scheduled patients’ appointments in a timely manner … and staff did not properly link completed appointment notes to the corresponding consults.”

In August 2015 there were “more than 22,000 individual patients had 34,769 open consults.” Nearly 5,000 people were waiting for appointments more than a month after the date the doctor recommended.

The IG said the improper cancellations included taking patients off lists when they were waiting for VA approval to see a non-VA doctor.

Rodriguez claimed VA officials at Washington headquarters concocted a plan to ping-pong patients back on forth between waiting-for-approval-to-see-private-doctor and waiting-for-government-doctors list. Each time that happened, the official number of days the patients were recorded as waiting was reset to zero.

“This will produce skewed access data because it will portray consults as having been seen sooner because they’ll be repeatedly shuffled between Vendor-VA,” he said, referring to it as “recycling consults.”

The IG also assessed allegations that Phoenix staff were keeping a second system of appointment records to keep wait times out of the reporting metrics that Congress and others could see, and which can affect cash performance bonuses for VA staff.

Investigators reviewed a printed list and said it was simply used “to record their attempts to contact the patients.” Rodriguez claimed that they reviewed the wrong thing, and that Post-It notes and, in some departments, Microsoft Outlook calendars were used to keep off-the-books records.

Rep. Jeff Miller, chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said in a statement that, “the work environment in Phoenix is marred by confusion and dysfunction. VA’s performance in Phoenix and across the nation will never improve until there are consequences up and down the chain of command.”

In response to the report, the Phoenix VA said it would develop “a process to review charts of deceased patients with open consults to determine if there was a delay in scheduling the requested care, and if so, how that delay might have impacted the outcome,” and “monitor compliance with national and local consult management policies.”

“Though we have made irrefutable progress, there is still much work to be done,” VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson said in a statement.

Follow Luke on Twitter. Send tips to luke@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel