Tag: VA Claims

Front Office vs. Back Office vs. Oversight – Additional VA Horror Stories

Lincoln WeepsOh, the bitter tears President Lincoln must weep…

One of the most troubling issues facing many organizations is exemplified perfectly by the VA, specifically the Post 9/11 GI Bill.  Previously I worked for an online university in a position where I saw GI-Bill problems affecting students on active duty, reserve, guard, and veterans, all being treated in wildly different manners.  The school GI-Bill office was expected to be subject matter experts on all things GI-Bill, but they regularly made decisions that harmed the students.  By interpreting the regulations and operating procedures differently from student to student.  Yet, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is just as confused as the universities trying to bill GI-Bill charges for students.

From a recent VA Office of Inspector General (VA-OIG) report, we find the following:

“The Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) did not always accurately process enrollments.  An estimated 2,500 of 10,000 enrollments from August 1, 2020, through April 1, 2021.  About 790 of the estimated errors involved officials either not reporting or underreporting vacation breaks.  VBA claims examiners often mishandled enrollments even when the correct information was submitted.  The VA-OIG estimated claims examiners incorrectly processed accurately reported vacation breaks for about 1,700 of 2,500 enrollments with errors.”

Why are these enrollments not processed correctly:

“Insufficient training and guidance meant school certifying officials frequently made mistakes.”  The VA takes legislation and writes the processes, procedures, and training materials for universities to use for operations and enrollment of military and veteran students.  Front office workers interact with students, back office workers interact with internal employees, the VA keeps the records current, and the VA forms the universities’ oversight resembling the blind leading the blind.  Yet, the VA cannot write effective training materials, processes, and procedures, conduct training, and support those who support students.

Per the VA-OIG report, the VBA is looking to implement an automated system to prevent these oversight issues from continuing.  I do not expect any automated system created by the VBA to work efficiently because of a simple principle, GIGO.  The garbage the VBA will put into the system will ALWAYS result in garbage coming out, creating more problems, costing too much money, and still creating issues for students and student-facing employees at universities and colleges across the country.  Somehow, the VA-OIG continues to buy these excuses and pipe dreams and reports the same to Congress, which is also purchasing these excuses and poor performances.VA 3

Before someone tries to claim this is isolated to the GI-Bill program, and the GI-Bill program has always been confusing.  Using this logic, the health complications at birth can be blamed on the father alone, and the mother’s behaviors do not influence the baby’s health.  Here the VA-OIG is reporting on another program governing VA employees, overseen by the OMB, and is incredibly useless as this is a repeated complaint between 2020 and 2022.

“Identity, credential, and access management (ICAM) is a set of tools, policies, and systems used to ensure the right individual has access to the right resource, at the right time, for the right reason in support of federal business objectives.  In February 2021, the VA Office of Inspector General (VA-OIG) received a hotline complaint claiming the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Human Resources and Administration/Operations, Security, and Preparedness and the Office of Information and Technology have not agreed since 2016 on roles and responsibilities for VA’s ICAM program.  Failures of ICAM contribute to the VA’s inability to effectively comply with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) policy.  The VA-OIG reviewed to determine whether VA effectively governs its ICAM program as required.”

What did the VA-OIG find?

      • The VA did not effectively manage and coordinate its ICAM program, not meeting three of the four OMB governance requirements.
      • The VA did not effectively assign roles and responsibilities, implement a single comprehensive ICAM policy, or meet its technology solutions roadmap goals for fiscal years 2020 and 2021.
      • The VA failed to implement updated digital identity risk management requirements.

Why can’t the VA obey OM oversight?

“These issues occurred primarily because leaders of the different offices performing VA’s ICAM functions have not agreed on how it should be governed.  VA risks restricting information from users who need it to perform their job functions without proper governance and leaving information vulnerable to improper use” [emphasis mine].

In this report, the OMB sits as oversight of the VA.  The employees are the frontline, and the leaders continue to fail to provide tools, policies, and resources to employees conducting the VA business.  What is still an incredibly terrible idea allowing the VA to remain self-governing.  Why isn’t the OMB more interested in demanding compliance?  Where is Congress scrutinizing how the executive branch agencies are failing and monitoring to improve conduct?VA 3

The VBA cannot still properly and timely adjudicate claims.  Again, the VA-OIG lambasted the VBA for improperly adjudicating claims, even with “Special-Focused Reviews.”  Essentially the quality assurance (QA) process in claim adjudication continues to fail to help improve claim processing accuracy.  From the report:

“The Office of Inspector General (VA-OIG) reviewed VBA’s design and implementation of its special-focused review process, including applying Government Accountability Office (GAO) standards.  The VA-OIG team assessed ten special-focused reviews completed from January 2019 through April 2021 and identified weaknesses in all five of GAO’s internal control components.  The VA-OIG also found the VBA Compensation Service’s standard operating procedure related to these special-focused reviews does not provide sufficient guidance to support disability claims-processing improvement fully.”

When I worked in QA, root causation was required to prevent future problems.  The VA-OIG found that the QA Special-Focused Reviews do not include root causes or explanations for why the claims were readjudicated, stopped, or delayed in VBA processing.  Do not repeated issues reflect the need to restrict self-governance until compliance can be observed?VA 3

Why should the VA have its self-governance restricted or prohibited?  The following VA-OIG makes clear that the VA cannot govern itself and correct the problems leadership continues to create.  Follow the timeline here, quoted directly from the VA-OIG report:

“The VA Office of Inspector General (VA-OIG) conducted this review to determine whether the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) accurately adjusted compensation and pension benefit payments for fugitive felons as mandated by law.  If VBA does not adjust payments, veterans who are fugitive felons will continue to receive benefits during periods of ineligibility.

In April 2012, VBA instructed regional offices to postpone making decisions on fugitive felon cases while it prepared new guidance.  During 2012 and 2013, VBA did not process fugitive felon cases.  In June 2014, VBA updated its definition of a fugitive felon to include only referrals indicating escape, flight, or violation of probation or parole conditions.  Although VBA then resumed adjusting payments, it did not review the unprocessed 2012 and 2013 cases.

In addition, due to inadequate monitoring, VBA did not process about 46 percent of cases referred by the VA-OIG in 2019 and 2020.  Finally, the team found VBA’s notification letters to veterans providing notice of the proposed action and right to a hearing did not always provide the required information.  Most commonly, VBA failed to include the reason for the issuance of the arrest warrant.”

The VA has been informed by the VA-OIG multiple times during the decade this problem has been surviving, and 46% of the cases the VA-OIG told the VA to fix still weren’t fixed in 2022.  How can any oversight agency still permit the VA to govern itself?  The leaders of the VA cannot self-govern, correct course, and make changes timely enough not to create additional expensive problems for veterans.  Each of these cases represents either an overpayment, where the VA is clawing funds back, or an underpayment, where the veteran has been shortchanged and is owed money.

When the VA claws money back from making a mistake that overpaid a veteran, dependent, spouse, or other entity, the VA-OIG has found that even here, the VBA cannot act per their policies, follow procedures, or notify veterans in a timely manner.  A veteran I got to know who served in Vietnam and caught a round in the heart that blew away a large chunk of his heart.  For 50 years or so, this was sufficient to have a 100% disability.  On the day he turned 69, his disability rating dropped to 80%, with a coinciding reduction in monthly benefits.  The VBA investigated this claim decision and found they had made a mistake, but their mistake would not significantly change the rating, so the veteran was stuck with an 80% rating and was told to go back to work.VA 3

To the best of my knowledge, the claim remains stuck in claims appeal hell, awaiting the judgment of the dark and benighted realms to act.  The veteran, who cannot hold a job due to weakness from lacking a significant part of his heart muscles, is driven into bankruptcy.  His heart will not regrow, but because his age has met the age when heart problems are actuarially known, the decision was made.  The decision was made without notification to the veteran, and the veteran only became aware of the situation when he had monies clawed back by the VA.  From the time the decision was made to the date he knew, 18 months had transpired, and the veteran was automatically sent to collections.  While this was never allowed to become a VA-OIG investigation, I have spoken to family members and the veteran while volunteering to help disabled people find employment.I-Care

To add the bitter cherry to this crap sundae, this is not the worst abuse I heard in my volunteer efforts.  Worse, this is not the worst story I have had related while talking to veterans in my travels across the continental 48 United States.  Veterans sit forever in claim hell; they cannot afford to go forward, they are abused when seeking medical help, and every interaction with VA medical providers runs the risk of being the victim of an “adverse medical event.”

To this point, the VA and the VBA have been central to proving that the VA cannot self-govern, oversight is failing, and the back office administrators are hindering the front office operations.  Surely the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), where people’s lives are at risk, would not have a similar problem.  Unfortunately, you would be wrong, and here is one VHA example, of many, to support this conclusion:

“A VA Medical Center (VAMC) community living center (CLC) staff delayed life-sustaining treatment for a patient (Patient A) who experienced cardiac arrest and died.  The VA-OIG also reviewed an allegation regarding a second patient (Patient B) who had resuscitation initiated, despite a do not resuscitate (DNR) order in the electronic health record (EHR).”

Why did one patient die without resuscitation and another get resuscitation without wanting it?  The policies and procedures were complicated, and the use of armbands confused the providers.  The providers (doctors and nurses) overseeing care had a person in the medical records of these patients and still could not properly act for patient care.  The patients had armbands and proper medical documents on file, and the providers still got confused and provided poor care, at best, to the patients involved.

America WeepsIn another long-term care facility under VA operation, the following occurred:

“The VA-OIG found that the day charge nurse’s assessment was delayed and incomplete, and the day charge nurse failed to properly document the resident’s reassessments, treatments, and interventions.  The VA-OIG substantiated that nursing staff failed to document and carry out a telephone order to transfer the resident to the Emergency Department but could not determine if this impacted the patient’s outcome.”

Let’s take a moment to allow this to sink in fully.  Failure to follow a doctor’s orders might have been part of the problem the patient DIED!  Yet, the chain of events is sufficiently blurry to mystify the investigators – this I find HIGHLY SUSPECT!  But, as the Home Shopping Network reports, “There’s more!”

“The VA-OIG determined that following the resident’s death, facility staff failed to conduct a comprehensive review of events leading up to and contributing to the resident’s death and, due to a lack of coordination of care at the time of discharge from the inpatient unit, the resident did not have the needed equipment upon admission to the CLC.”

I accept that a nurse’s role is stressful, the VA policies do not make their jobs less stressful, and the healthcare leadership (overall) is abysmal on the best days.  However, killing a patient is still a BAD thing!  I-CareYet, here we have another dead veteran at the hands of the medical care providers, and the best the VA-OIG can do is make ten (10) recommendations for change.  Does anyone believe the VA can continue to self-govern under its current misguided leadership and convoluted organizational structure?

Ask yourself, would the abuse of the veterans mean more if this was your uncle, brother, father, mother, sister, or aunt?  They are your family members for the problems which they face; we all face in our constitutional republic.  Where is Congress scrutinizing the government?  Please become interested, active, and engaged, or we will lose this constitutional republic to the tyranny of the power-hungry despots.

© Copyright 2023 – M. Dave Salisbury
The author holds no claims for the art used herein, the pictures were obtained in the public domain, and the intellectual property belongs to those who created the images.  Quoted materials remain the property of the original author.

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“That’s Crazy!!!” – More Chronicles from the VA Chapter 4

Last week, my primary care provider informed me that the VA is no longer responsible for providing my prescriptions as an outside provider that the VA Community Services team sent me to has increased my dosage.  My primary care provider pulled a Pontius Pilot and washed her hands, and I am swinging in the wind with more bureaucracy and less service.  The best part of the news delivered this last week, the fallacious, seditious, and felonious attack on my character, the behavior problem flag, is controlled by the primary care provider.  Boy, I am sick of the bureaucracy of the VA; if only this were the worst of the bureaucratic baloney, the VA is pushing out.

From many VA-OIG reports during COVID, the following, or something close, was a regular statement:

“During COVID-19, VHA’s Office of Community Care (OCC) took steps to ensure veterans continued to have expanded access to health care in the community, as required by the VA MISSION Act of 2018.  OCC issued policies to VA facilities to postpone non-urgent appointments and offer alternatives to in-person care, such as telehealth.”

The VA-OIG inspected to see how closely this statement was adhered to during the height of the COVID pandemic.  What surprises no one is how badly the VA managed community care during the pandemic.

Findings:

    • The VA-OIG found that routine community care consults were unscheduled, averaging 42 days, not meeting VHA’s timeliness goal of 30 days.
    • Community care staff faced significant challenges beyond their control that contributed to the scheduling delays, such as the lack of availability of appointments in the community.
    • Some patients were hesitant to schedule appointments during the pandemic, failed to return phone calls, or declined care once it was offered. – While some of this is definitely patient-driven, what is not discussed is the abrupt shift, the lack of trust, and the confusion about the need to pay the community providers, among other things, faced by veterans forced into community care. As a reference point, it has been 24-months, and I am still facing requests to pay several community providers due to the VA not paying the bill due to a technicality.  The VA claims the provider has to “eat the costs,” but I keep getting statements and calls from collection agencies.  Guess the direction of my credit score, the direction of my insurance costs, and how happy I am with community care providers.
    • The VA-OIG found community care providers and staff did not consistently comply with requirements to manage routine consults, and leaders lacked tools to sufficiently monitor program operations that could have identified the problems.
    • Deficiencies emerged in documenting when patients were contacted about scheduling appointments, designating patients eligible for alternative care, and ensuring staff was trained in ways that would address those weaknesses. – Not to mention that pertinent medical records still haven’t been transmitted, received, and alerted the primary care provider. I had gallbladder removal surgery; no records ever made it to the VA.  I have MRIs, CT scans, and ER notes that, even after being hand-delivered, have not been added to my VA electronic health record and presented to the primary care provider to discuss, dating back to 2010.

How’s that community service program working for you?  In any other industry, this performance would represent an abysmal failure; but community care represents a healthy opportunity for improvement at the VA.  The findings listed are a mere drop in the conclusions discussed in the report.  I have a suggestion for the VA, stop overpromising and underdelivering.  How about you under-promise and then over-deliver?

The following VA-OIG inspection report focused on the Veteran Health Administration facility’s adherence to guidelines for medication management, and the following explanation is quoted from the report:

“This report describes medication management findings from healthcare inspections initiated at 36 VHA medical facilities from November 4, 2019, through September 21, 2020.  Each inspection involved interviews with facility leaders and staff and clinical and administrative processes reviews.  The results in this report are a snapshot of VHA performance at the time of the fiscal year 2020 OIG reviews.”

Before we get into the findings, let me elaborate on that statement.  The VA-OIG cherry-picked/hand-selected call it what you will, the facilities to inspect.  No criteria discuss how these facilities were selected.  More, the processes chosen for review were also cherry-picked/hand-selected.  Appearing to represent that, the VA-OIG stacked the deck to obtain success, and the VHA still failed, or rather showed weaknesses.

Generally, the VA-OIG rated the VHA facilities as “compliant.”  But “weaknesses” were identified; read that as the VHA cannot follow established guidelines, protocols, and processes, even though they wrote and established these guidelines and medication protocols.  I call this designed incompetence of a criminal nature, but I am not half as lenient and politically astute as the VA-OIG!

Findings:

    • Aberrant behavior risk assessments
    • Concurrent benzodiazepine therapy
    • Urine drug testing
    • Informed consent
    • Patient follow-up
    • Quality measure oversight.

The following, also from the medication’s adherence inspection, remains significant:

“The OIG examined the following indicators of program
oversight and evaluation:

      • Performance of pain management committee activities
      • Monitoring of quality measures
      • Following the quality improvement process”

For the weaknesses represented in the findings to be prevalent, the “Pain Management Committee activities” represent a general failure of the committee to function!  For quality processes to be a finding, monitoring quality signifies that the bureaucrats are NOT doing the jobs they were hired to perform!  A quality process fails when the humans tasked with oversight refuse to engage, and the VA-OIG findings testify to the truth of humans actively refusing to do their jobs individually and collectively!

Having read and written about the VA-OIG reports for almost ten years, I swear sentences containing the following represent a majority stake in why the VA-OIG cannot be trusted.

“VA-OIG inspections… underscored the value of independent oversight of care received in these settings to help VA make continuous improvements.”

Really?  Are you sure the VA-OIG inspections provide “independent oversight” and spur “continuous improvement” at the inspected VA facilities?  I have significant doubts the inspections do anything more than highlight the problems as the VA-OIG inspectors have no teeth, and lying has zero repercussions for the humans defrauding the taxpayer!  How do I know this; the VA-OIG reports generally go on to make a claim similar to the following:

“The OIG’s findings show that immediate attention is needed in several critical areas….”

Do you, the dear reader, understand better the frustration of veterans and their families?  When the Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) covering the National Cemeteries, Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), and Veterans Health Administration (VHA), can be deluded, distracted, and duped by conniving and conspiring people, what else can the veterans and their families do BUT become frustrated?  This is behavior unacceptable in every industry.  In fact, legislation overseeing non-government healthcare is strict in outlawing the conduct observed in government-provided healthcare, but somehow the VA is exempt.  Yet, the VA continues to make claims such as the following:

“This is how the VA is delivering on its promise to care for the veteran who has borne the battle, his widow, and his children.”

But don’t take my word for it; the VA-OIG conducted several more Comprehensive Healthcare Inspections (CHIPs), resembling cookie-cutter inspections.  Staff training continues to be a major delinquency labeled as “High-Risk.”  Behavior Committee continues to be a central sticking point and inspection problem.  Cleanliness, tagged under “Quality, Safety, and Value,” continues to represent an area for growth and development.  Nurse-to-Nurse communications remain constant as a problem, and electronic medical records are not helping to improve on this problem.  Inter-facility transferring of patients, policy, and documentation also resemble a constant issue.  I feel like I could summarize a CHIPs report with my eyes closed; tell me, when does the “independent oversight” spur “continuous improvement?”

On the topic of “independent oversight” spurring “continuous improvement,” the VA-OIG conducted a VHA inspection of mental health activities for FY 2020.  Declaring:

“This report describes mental health-related findings from healthcare inspections initiated at 36 Veterans Health Administration medical facilities from November 4, 2019, through September 21, 2020, and electronic health record review at five additional facilities.  Each inspection involved interviews with facility leaders and staff and clinical and administrative processes.”

Again, how the facilities were selected and the items reviewed appears to have stacked the deck in the VHA’s favor.  The VHA is still failing, showing weakness while generally being compliant.

Findings:

    • Completion of four follow-up visits within the required time frame
    • Appropriate follow-up of veterans with high-risk patient record flags who do not attend mental health appointments
    • Suicide prevention training
    • Completion of five monthly outreach activities.

Under these four categories, recommendations for improvement included:

    • Registered Nurse Credentialling – Source verification of licenses.
    • Staff training on Suicide Prevention
    • Care Coordination – Especially in transferring the patient, form completion, and evaluating transferred patients
    • Medication list transmission during transfers
    • Staff Training
    • Patient notification
    • Attending the Disruptive Behavior Committee

For anyone else keeping record, most of the list above is a repeat from the last several years the mental health inspection has occurred.  Color me shocked that the VA would still have issues remaining year-over-year, and if you cannot hear the sarcasm in that statement, I have some suggestions for you!

I am thoroughly sick to death of the VA failing in its mission, then bragging they are providing “Excellence in Healthcare.”  If the staff is not trained, they cannot perform their jobs, representing a leadership failure.  This is a truth for all industries, occupations, businesses, organizations, etc.  Nobody is exempt from this statement of fact, yet the VA-OIG keeps on swallowing this excuse year-over-year, and NO PROGRESS is EVER made!

America, are you aware of what the various government agencies are doing with your money, on your time, and with your consent?  If your neighbor took your checkbook and wrote checks you are legally responsible for paying, would you want better services rendered?  Elected officials (yes, I am including those at the city, county, state levels of government), why are you NOT scrutinizing the government more effectively and rigorously?  You, the elected officials, are the neighbor writing checks; why are YOU NOT doing the job we hired you to perform?

Elected officials, did you know that VA is not required to maintain records of returned bills, as a matter of policy, but those returned bills mailed to veterans are causing hardship for veterans.  I cannot recount how many times I have changed my address and my spouse’s address with the VA, on the VA-approved websites, and in-person with VA representatives, and still have had mail not delivered for months due to a wrong address in a legacy system.  Yet, the VA is not policy mandated to check returned mail, track that mail to a veteran, and check the different legacy and non-legacy systems for address veracity.

Elected officials, do you read the VA-OIG reports?  Honest question, as the following is directly from a VA-OIG report.

“[VHA primary care] providers did not consistently

        • Identify a surrogate should the patient lose decision-making capacity
        • Address previous advance directives, state-authorized portable orders, and/or life-sustaining treatment plans
        • Address the patient or surrogate’s understanding of the patient’s condition.”

The VA designed the PACT Team to improve care and deliver on the VA’s mission, yet the primary care provider has the following failures weaknesses showing.  The VA-OIG can do nothing to improve this glaring oversight, but you were elected to force change and spur “continuous improvement” in the executive branch officers and employees.  Well, where are you?  The VA-OIG substantiated that a failure in the PACT team led to a delay in a cancer diagnosis, causing increased pain, problems, and resource loss for a veteran; where are the elected officials, and the media for that matter, in raising a holy rhubarb on the PACT Team failing this veteran?

Elected officials, did you catch that statement in the VA-OIG report on the cancer diagnosis?

“Facility leaders have an unwritten expectation that primary care providers conduct a thorough historical review of the patient’s electronic health record starting with the most recent annual note; however, the OIG found that not all of the patient’s providers conducted historical reviews, but instead focused on current issues and problems identified by the patient.”

Having transferred between PACT teams inside the VHA and state-to-state, I can affirm this is exactly what is transpiring in the PACT team; the second most important player, behind the patient, is the primary care provider.  When the primary care doctor fails in their job, like dominoes falling, the care of the patients rapidly cascades into a dynamic failure of healthcare in a VHA facility.  What are YOU doing to stop this madness and demand accountability?

The electronic health record has a section near the top of the record for “Problem List.”  Guess what; when providers fail to keep this section updated, current, and accurate, the healthcare of the patient borders on malpractice requiring only a slight push to arrive with a dead veteran.  The VA-OIG found providers and nursing staff failures to update the problems list accurately, keep the problems list current, and regularly discuss the problems list with the most critical member of the PACT team, the patient!  Providers failed to comply with sound science, good business practices, and act appropriately for the patient’s health; do you think this might be a slight problem in the PACT team?

I have offered the VA several suggestions for plotting a path forward.  Yet, the VA cannot and will not take advice without stern and reproachful measures taken by Congress.  Elected officials, it is time for you to act and groundswell the changes needed in every government agency, even if it means reducing the size of government!

© Copyright 2022 – M. Dave Salisbury
The author holds no claims for the art used herein, the pictures were obtained in the public domain, and the intellectual property belongs to those who created the images.  Quoted materials remain the property of the original author.