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VA to resume sharing quality-of-care data with national consumer site

Donovan Slack
USA TODAY
A visitor leaves the Sacramento Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Rancho Cordova, Calif. on April 2, 2015.

WASHINGTON – The Department of Veterans Affairs will resume sharing data on the quality of care at its facilities with a national consumer database on October 1, the agency said Tuesday.

The move comes one day after USA TODAY reported that VA had stopped submitting data on July 1 to Hospital Compare, a site run by Department of Health and Human Services, despite a 2014 law mandating that the VA provide even more comprehensive statistics to the site so veterans can make informed choices about where to seek care.

The site allows comparisons between public and private hospitals around the country on a number of criteria, including death and readmission rates. The VA inked a new agreement with HHS on Tuesday allowing it to resume sharing the performance data.

“We’re very pleased and I know HHS is pleased and I think this is going to be a boon for veterans and the American people,” Joe Francis, director of analytics and reporting at the Veterans Health Administration, said in an interview.

Francis, who had said the VA stopped submitting information on the advice of HHS lawyers until an agreement was in place, said the agencies had been working on a data-sharing deal for some time. But he said USA TODAY’s inquiries about the database served to “heighten the awareness” among those involved about how important the issue is to the public and moved the process along.

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VA quit sending performance data to national health care quality site

The Choice Act, which became law in August 2014, actually required VA and HHS to sign the agreement and start reporting more data to Hospital Compare by February 2015.

But last week, more than 18 months after that deadline, Francis told USA TODAY the process had been hampered by bureaucracy at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services at HHS, which runs the site. He said CMS had to rejigger contracts with at least eight different vendors who handle the data for the site before an agreement could be finalized.

Now, he expects the public will be able to access VA data sets on the site as soon as the agreement takes effect Oct. 1 and to have it easily searchable on Hospital Compare by the end of the year. In addition to readmission and death rates for patients suffering heart attacks or pneumonia, which the agency had shared since 2010, the VA will now report on more conditions such as infections contracted in its hospitals.

Francis said he did not know yet whether the VA would include data between July 1 and September 30 this year, when it had stopped reporting.

“That’s part of the conversation,” he said.

Some Republicans on Capitol Hill expressed concern Tuesday that the VA had not moved more quickly to comply with the law.

"The fact that the VA and HHS have now decided and announced they will follow the law — only after national press disclosure — proves the importance of transparency in fixing the problems plaguing the VA,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House VA Committee, said it raised questions about whether the agency was deliberately trying to hide data from the public.

“VA’s lack of transparency is infuriating, but it’s not at all surprising, as this isn’t the first time VA has chosen to ignore a law designed to improve VA’s performance and help veterans and taxpayers,” he said.

Rep. Martha Roby, R-Ala., who has introduced legislation requiring the VA to report even more information on medical center performance, noted that the requirement in the Choice Act was “not a suggestion, it’s the law.”

“We can’t require the VA to go in and fix a failing medical center if we don’t have access to the data which shows that it’s a failing medical center,” she said.

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