“The Department of Veterans Affairs is reaching a turning point in how it manages its technology and services.”
“VA is taking its urgent, no-fail mindset from the pandemic and instilling it across every part of its technology infrastructure.”
“Our motto was, basically, ‘let’s stay ahead of demand no matter what the demand was.’ If it was the telehealth visit issue, we want to make sure that we had, no matter what the circumstances were, sufficient bandwidth to support this rapidly growing demand on the infrastructure. The cloud helped. The infrastructure upgrades helped,” said Paul Brubaker, the deputy CIO for the Account Management Office at the VA, during a media roundtable on Sept. 23, which played on Ask the CIO. “Keep in mind during April to June, we on boarded 96,000 new employees to help support our COVID response. These are contractors and new VA employees, and we had to provision them. I recall, I forget the exact number of nurses, but it was well over 100 that were going to show up in Chicago over the weekend. We found out about it Tuesday or Wednesday, and we were able to get those devices provisioned and get them productive day one.”
“Brubaker said VA’s motto extended to not just typical technology challenges, but to extraordinary events such as when Baylor University offered up a hospital to the agency for COVID infected veterans…” Read the full article here.
Source: VA extending pandemic IT mindset to continue modernization acceleration, October 1, 2021. Federal News Network.
