“Health care technology represents the potential to transform lives nationwide, ensuring that no matter where you are, you can connect with health care professionals when needed and get high-quality care without a long-term wait. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, this potential is not lost on the IT experts, who are focused on designing that technology to help veterans and ensure they receive the high standard of health care they deserve.”
“’We in IT don’t like to build IT for IT’s sake,’ said VA Office of Information Technology Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Dominic Cussatt at the Veterans Digital Transformation Breakfast Nov. 7. Cussatt emphasized that his team’s goal is to build IT for the customers’ needs, leading to better capabilities and a stronger understanding of the agency’s mission…”
“’Before we start [designing], we’re doing user stories, we’re interviewing the customers, we’re finding out exactly what they need it to do and how they plan to use it,’ Cussatt added…”
“One example of this design is VA.gov, Morton said. Previously, VA.gov was a ‘very corporate’ website, but after deciding in 2017 to unite all veterans’ services online under VA.gov, all veterans’ services were migrated to that one domain and redesigned with a customer focus in 2018. In the year since the relaunch, customer satisfaction with the website has gone up 9%, Morton said, with an increase of 10 million unique visits per month to the site.”
“Agile processes ‘have been a change in mindset’ at the VA, Cussatt added, allowing VA OIT to deploy tools to veterans and VA employees much faster than before. In one example, through the DevOps model, VA OIT designed and deployed a user-acceptance tested decision support tool nationwide in the span of only five months…” Read the full article here.
Source: VA Puts Trust, Human-Centered Design at Core of Health Care Transformation – By James Mersol, November 11, 2019. GovernmentCIO.
