“The Department of Veterans Affairs was one of the biggest recipients of emergency IT funding in response to the coronavirus pandemic earlier this spring. And according to CIO James Gfrerer, the VA is ‘putting every penny of’ the more than $2 billion it received for things like telework and telehealth to ‘effective use.’”
“Gfrerer said Thursday during an AFCEA Bethesda virtual event that with the support of that funding — about a third of the $6.1 billion IT budget the department received in fiscal 2020 — the VA ‘moved ahead quickly and accelerated our digital transformation and our expansion across a number of areas’ to continue providing critical services to veterans during the pandemic.”
“With that, the department has been able to stay ahead of the technology demands of its different lines of business — providing health care, benefits and cemetery services for veterans — as they were forced to move to remote operations, he said…”
“With the help of the $2 billion in emergency IT appropriations from the CARES Act, though, the VA went ‘from a high of about 40,000 workers in a remote access posture to almost 140,000 presently’ teleworking, he said.”
“The VA has also doubled its virtual private network and Citrix gateway bandwidth for remote network access and tripled its telehealth capacity with a ‘tenfold increase in daily appointments,’ Gfrerer said…”‘Aggressively’ using collaboration tools
“Like many other federal agencies, COVID-19 amplified the importance of collaboration tools for the VA. Gfrerer said the VA was responsible for one of the largest ‘single-day deployments of Microsoft Teams,’ rolling out the tool to more than 400,000 users in rapid fashion…” Read the full article here.
Source: How VA improved its IT with $2B in emergency coronavirus funding – By Billy Mitchell, May 29, 2020. FedScoop.
