What the Audit Found
The OIG found that VHA medical facilities that opted for community care staff to conduct indexing of medical records did not sufficiently comply with VHA requirements. 8 The lack of local (facility-level) procedures contributed to community care staff lacking adequate training and oversight to accurately index non-VA medical records to veterans’ EHRs. Inaccurate indexing of medical records poses a risk to veteran care and increases the burden on VHA staff who have to locate and correct the errors, reducing their time for other tasks. The finding is supported by the determinations, discussed more fully below, that · community care staff did not always accurately enter non-VA records into VHA’s system; · VHA facilities lacked standard operating procedures with defined processes and staff responsibilities; · training, quality checks, and quality assurance monitoring were inadequate for community care staff performing scanning; and · lack of adequate procedures, training, quality checks, and monitoring adversely affected VHA operations
Read the full 27-page report here.
Source: Improvements Needed in Adding Non-VA Medical Records to Veterans’ Electronic Health Records, June 17, 2021. VA OIG.
