VA Announces New Steps to Improve Low-Performing Health Centers

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) recently announced it will aggressively implement new strategies to improve the quality of care at low-performing medical centers throughout the country. 

“President Trump has made it clear that our Veterans deserve only the best when it comes to their healthcare, and that’s why we are focusing on improving our lowest performing facilities nationwide,” David Shulkin, MD, secretary of the VA, said in the press release. 

Within the VA, there are currently 15 medical centers that received the lowest scores in the SAIL star rating system—the VA”s in-house rating system. The VA considers these medical centers “low-performing.”

The VA plans to quickly implement a number of steps, including streamlining the Agency’s accountability leadership, identifying improvement targets through quality analysis, deployment of resources to meet the needs of these identified targets, and tracking improvement in measurements. The Agency also noted that it will take action against leadership at the low-performing centers if they fail to improve quality measures.

“We will employ tight timelines for facilities to demonstrate improvement, and if low performance persists, we will make swift changes—including replacing facility leaders—until we achieve the rapid improvements that Veterans and taxpayers expect from VA,” Dr Shulkin said.

The list of low-performing medical centers includes: Phoenix in Arizona; Loma Linda in California; Denver in Colorado; Dublin in Georgia; Jackson in Mississippi; Roseburg in Oregon; Memphis, Murfreesboro, and Nashville in Tennessee; Big Spring, El Paso, and Harlingen in Texas; Hampton in Virginia; Walla Walla  in Washington; and Washington in Washington DC.  —David Costil