VA Looks To Apply Innovation To Better Care And Service For Veterans

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs launched a new innovation center to solve big problems.

...Given that context, the launch of a new VA innovation center today takes on a different meaning. The scale and gravity of the problems that the VA faces demand true innovation: new ideas, technology or methodologies that challenge and improve upon existing processes and systems, improving the lives of people or the function of the society that they live within.

“When we set out in 2010 to knowingly adopt the ‘I word’, we did so with the full knowledge that there had to be something there,” said Jonah J. Czerwinski, senior advisor to VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and director of the VA Innovation Initiative, in a recent interview. “We chose to define value around four measurable attributes that mean something to taxpayers, veterans, Congressional delegations and staff: access, quality, cost control and customer satisfaction. The hard part was making it real. We focused for the first year on creating a foundation for what we knew had to justify its own existence, including identifying problem areas.”

The new VA Center for Innovation (VACI) is the descendent of the VA’s Innovation Initiative (VAi2), which was launched in 2010. Along with the VACI, the VA announced that it would adopt an innovation fellows program, following the successful example set by the White House, Department of Health and Human Services and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and bring in an “entrepreneur-in-residence.” The new VACI will back 13 new projects from an industry competition, including improvements to prosthetics, automated sterilization, the Blue Button and cochlear implants. The VA also released a report on the VACI’s progress to date....