As if the Department of Veterans Affairs didn’t have enough to deal with, the Daily Caller purports to have evidence that operational inefficiencies within the VA system, which led to a significant backlog in patient exam requests, also led to the deletion of hundreds of patients who logged request more than half a year prior. While the VA dismissed the report at “scurrilous” and inaccurate, audio from an internal meeting in 2008 contains directions to delete backlogged requests, which automatically erases any record that the request was made in the first place.
“The committee was called System Redesign and the purpose of the meeting was to figure out ways to correct the department’s efficiency. And one of the issues at the time was the backlog,” explained Oliver Mitchell, a former patient services assistant in the VA Greater Los Angeles Medical Center. Mitchell claims that VA Greater Los Angeles Radiology Department Chief Dr. Suzie El-Saden gave him direction to cut appointment requests that had been sitting for six to nine months, effectively deleting the paper trail of poor efficiency and productivity that would drag down the facility’s reporting stats.
“We just didn’t have the resources to conduct all of those exams. Basically we would get about 3,000 requests a month for [medical] exams, but in a 30-day period we only had the resources to do about 800. That rolls over to the next month and creates a backlog,” Mitchell said. ”It’s a numbers thing. The waiting list counts against the hospitals efficiency. The longer the veteran waits for an exam that counts against the hospital as far as productivity is concerned.” Mitchell also says that the complaint he filed with the VA Inspector General was not followed with a full investigation, and bringing attention to the situation later caused him to lose his job.
But VA officials immediately countered the accusation, stating that the clean-up effort was part of a planned administrative push to clear out obsolete requests, not cover up the fact that the requests existed to begin with. “No one who needed care was denied care,” Robert Petzel, VA Undersecretary for Health told lawmakers at a House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing Wednesday. “This was a carefully thought out review. There was no attempt to eliminate records.”
Only about 300 records were closed, Petzel said, and the data consisted of cases in which patients had failed to respond to multiple requests for follow-up. Many of the records were imaging studies older than a year that would no longer have had clinical relevance if the patient had continued to need treatment, or were ordered for patients in the emergency room who didn’t continue with follow-up care in the same facility. None of the patients were actively involved in seeking care, he stressed, and all records were subject to a thorough review before deletion.
“VA has established a record of safe, exceptional health care that is consistently recognized by independent reviews and organizations,” said the VA’s official statement on the matter. “VA did not destroy patients’ personal medical records in VA’s electronic health record system, which has been in place since the 1990s. America’s Veterans deserve the very best this nation can offer to honor their service and sacrifice. What Veterans do not deserve is misinformation and distortions that may cause them to avoid seeking earned services and benefits. They deserve facts.” Source
