In June the President signed the VA MISSION Act into law which overhauled the Veterans Community Care Program. If you aren’t familiar, the community care program allows veterans to access private care outside of traditional U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities. It was created in 2014 in response to the very public PR nightmare concerning extensive wait times and other instances of negligence.

In addition to expanding access to telehealth, the VA MISSION Act also requires the VA to develop access standards for furnishing hospital, medical and extended care (i.e. – adult day care, long term services and supports, hospice care and home healthcare) services for their community care program. To develop these standards, the VA released a request for information (RFI) to solicit input from the public.

Given our insight as an accreditor with existing relationship with the VA, I thought it would be a great opportunity to help guide the VA in the right direction with respect to our work in the network adequacy space. URAC’s key recommendation in the comment letter is for the VA to implement a dynamic network adequacy evaluation process that is not solely based on quantitative elements like time and/or distance. Quantitative standards are useful as benchmarks to measure against, but they are merely a static marker in time. As such, they don’t allow the VA to remain agile in response to evolving community needs.

Regardless of partisan squabbles over whether the VA is moving towards privatization, I think it’s safe to say that everyone on both sides of the aisle wants to ensure veterans have access to high quality care in a timely fashion.

You can read URAC’s full comments here.