Improving VA and Community Care Scheduling

Too often, veterans are left waiting while staff place lots of phone calls back and forth between veterans and providers to find available community care appointments. I personally experienced this frustration, which is why I was glad to see the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) recently completed its nationwide implementation of the External Provider Scheduling (EPS) system, an interface that finally allows VA employees to book appointments for veterans at both VA hospitals and community care providers on the same platform.This unified system is already connecting veterans with the best, earliest available appointment and reducing wait times by allowing VA employees to go from only being able to book a small handful of community care appointments per day to booking as many as 25 appointments per day. Now, more veterans are getting their appointments faster, with less hassle, and in their own community rather than driving hours to the nearest VA hospital.

This week, the House of Representatives took action to make this change permanent when we passed legislation I wrote called the Veterans Community Care Scheduling Improvement Act (H.R. 3842). Requiring every VA hospital across the United States to use this simplified, streamlined system in place will give our veterans the access and certainty they earned by ensuring this progress is not undone by a future administration. 

This bill is a step in the right direction, but we have more work to do to address the wait times, long drives, and needless bureaucracy that keep too many veterans from getting the care they need. The Senate should follow our lead and immediately vote to send this bill to the president’s desk to be signed into law.

Click here to read the Veterans Community Care Scheduling Improvement Act.