S607-119

What This Bill Does

Requires the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, through the Veterans Health Administration and VA Office of Information and Technology, to improve VA health-care appointment scheduling. The plan or integrated project team must deliver tools that let VA patients and personnel view available appointments across primary care, mental health care, specialty care, providers, clinics, hospitals, and other patient-care offices. It must also support patient self-service scheduling, referral requests when referrals are needed, cancellation and rescheduling, and a telephone pathway where a scheduler can fully book appointments for patients who do not want or cannot use online scheduling.

Who Benefits and How

Veterans seeking VA appointments benefit from easier visibility into available appointments, online self-service booking, referral workflows, cancellation and rescheduling tools, and preserved non-online scheduling. VA scheduling employees, Veterans Health Administration clinics, VA hospitals, Office of Information and Technology staff, and health IT contractors benefit from clearer requirements, deployment schedules, metrics, and alignment with the Electronic Health Record Modernization Program.

Who Bears the Burden and How

The Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration, VA Office of Information and Technology, integrated project team members, scheduling managers, and EHR modernization contractors must build, deploy, coordinate, train, track metrics, manage change, report costs, and submit implementation progress reports to House and Senate Veterans Affairs committees. VA must fully implement the plan within two years after submission and explain any scheduling objective, feature, or service that cannot be included.

Key Provisions

• Requires VA to submit a scheduling-improvement plan within one year or establish an integrated project team to deliver scheduling capabilities.
• Requires scheduling tools that let patients and VA personnel view available appointments for primary care, mental health care, specialty care, providers, clinics, and hospitals.
• Requires a self-service platform for booking, referral requests, cancellation, and rescheduling.
• Requires telephone scheduler support so veterans can fully schedule appointments through non-online channels.
• Requires VA to align scheduling improvements with the Electronic Health Record Modernization Program.
• Requires implementation within two years and annual reports on costs, deployment schedule, metrics, challenges, and lessons learned.