“There is no bright-side to a life-altering pandemic, but perhaps one silver lining of the modern one involves how it drove the Veterans Affairs Department to swiftly extend and adopt fresh digital and health technologies.”
“The massive agency manages the nation’s largest integrated health system, among other major responsibilities. When COVID-19 emerged in early 2020, patients overwhelmed medical facilities and hospitals, supply chains hit bottlenecks, and governments directed people to stay home. Many VA officials pivoted to implement tools and policies to cope with new needs and manufactured vital resources on their own grounds.”
“’Technology makes it possible for us to solve old problems in new ways,’ the VA’s Chief Technology Officer Charles Worthington recently told Nextgov. ‘COVID-19 taught us we must be thinking of users interacting with their health care and other government services from home.'”
“All in all, the department introduced or updated more than 100 applications in support of its COVID-19 response, and officials reported seeing returns on investments in DevSecOps, cloud capabilities, automation, monitoring and more that they’d made prior to the pandemic’s onset.”
“’For instance, our investment in cloud allowed us to quickly scale and deliver an exponential increase in services,’ Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary in VA’s Information and Technology Office John “Jack” Galvin explained. ‘We were able to leverage existing technologies and introduce new ones to stay ahead of demand for telework, telehealth, veteran communications, COVID-19 screenings, and vaccination scheduling and tracking.'”
“They and other VA executives recently briefed Nextgov via email about some technology-aligned implications of their department’s pandemic response…” Read the full article here.
Source: How the Veterans Affairs Department Went Digital During the Pandemic – By Brandi Vincent, September 21, 2021. Federal News Network.
