Better IT, More Efficiencies Needed At Joint VA/DOD Health Centers, GAO Finds

There are several barriers to healthcare collaboration between the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense, especially in the area of health IT, a Government Accountability Office report has found (PDF).

The VA and the DOD don’t require that their various joint healthcare projects, known as collaboration sites, use performance metrics to measure their effectiveness, the GAO found, and that’s led to inefficiencies at the agencies’ joint projects in health IT systems, business and administrative processes, access to medical facilities and joint VA and DOD planning for medical facility construction.