Veterans receive health care and non-health benefits from VA. You most likely know VA’s Veterans Health Administration (VHA), Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) and National Cemetary Administration (NCA).
But there’s another team behind the scenes at VA who work daily to partner with and support VHA, VBA,and NCA to serve Veterans and to help make the processes more efficient and better for VA staff and Veterans.
Can you guess who we are? And more importantly, why should you care?
Our team consults and collaborates with every administration – VHA, VBA, NCA – leaders and staff and other program offices regularly to develop solutions to improve business process efficiencies and business and Veteran outcomes. We are a partner with all VA organizations.
Our employees and contractors are present in or virtually support every VA facility nationwide, including VA Medical Centers (VAMCs), VA clinician offices, regional benefits offices, and cemeteries and memorial services facilities.
A 71-year old Veteran recently spoke about how a VA tool we deliver helped him quickly and easily connect with VHA to get his COVID-19 vaccine – and he was happy and surprised how VA reached out to him proactively and made scheduling the vaccine so easy for him.
We help supply and sustain operation of end-user devices, infrastructure, networks and cybersecurity that are critical to Veteran health care in hospitals and clinician offices, and provide and sustain bandwidth needed as the backbone to telehealth services – including telemedicine, tele-mental health, and telecritical care. These services have been especially critical and the demand skyrocketed during the pandemic, and our office kept up with the needed bandwidth to support all the increased demand for health care from home.
We provide end-user devices, infrastructure, networks and cybersecurity that are vital to VBA claims processing and for VBA and NCA providing Veteran benefits and memorial services to Veterans.
We create and support development of user-friendly, helpful Veteran-facing digital tools that we put into Veterans’ hands to give them easier access to health care and benefits, including VA and health mobile apps and the va.gov website.
For example, three frontline digital technology tools we rolled out, or expanded features of, this past year are significantly aiding VA’s COVID-19 response and making a difference in delivering COVID-19 care and vaccine services to Veterans and families.
We work with our partners to digitize business processes across VA to streamline VHA, VBA, NCA and other VA internal business processes that enhance delivery of services to Veterans.
We’re crucial partners on projects like Electronic Health Record Modernization, MISSION Act, Colmery GI Bill, Financial Management Business Transformation (FMBT), Defense Medical Logistics Standard Support (DMLSS)/LogiCole Implementation, and more. We ensure that IT is in place and operational to manage and deliver to Veterans under all these programs.
We help ensure all VA systems work together, focusing on system interoperability across VA and with our DOD and other government partners.
We drive VA’s digital transformation strategy, including IT and technology modernization.
Have you guessed who we are yet? We are…
VA’s Office of Information and Technology and we are committed to bringing modern technology to boost VA’s capabilities and continuously enhance VA’s delivery of benefits and services to Veterans. It Starts With Us.
We think this is a crucial mission and our team is always seeking to enhance digital innovation to ensure VA consistently delivers exceptional customer service to our Veterans.
Related Stories:
- 71-Year-Old Veteran Marvels at VA’s VEText Vaccine Appointment Scheduling Ease
- Ethics Principles for Access to and Use of Veteran Data
- VA’s Commitment to Ethics Safeguards Veterans’ Data, Including Mobile Apps
- Keep Me Informed tool
- VEText messaging platform
- COVID-19 research volunteer registry to help connect Veterans with cutting-edge clinical research opportunities.
- VA’s Digital Transformation Strategy
- Visit DigitalVA public website
- Follow DigitalVA Twitter
- Visit DigitalVA LinkedIn
VA’s Office of Information and Technology (OIT) contributed this report.
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The VA Health and Benefits mobile app is modernizing how Veterans access and manage their health care and benefits information.
Updated COVID vaccines are available free of charge to Veterans receiving care at VA .
Learn how you can guard your VA online health information against scammers and online threats when using My HealtheVet or VA apps.
johnny5 is absolutely right. Better yet, just go back to in person everything, no one can hack that. Problem as I see it, is the va is pushing and driving veterans out so they can just pocket all that designated money for themselves. Their IT people are idiots. Must be children still in grade school that think they know what they are doing. Absolutely no common sense, anywhere in the va.
With over a billion $$ in funding, one would think that Veterans have the best internet access the world has to offer.
So why is it that all of these are so partitioned and fragmented? One access point for everything should be the (smartest) gold standard, yet, it is not. IT took down the kiosk access for travel pay, and now we are herded into a separate website with its own sign-in to access travel claims. Vets.gov was supposed to the one site for everything, yet…a large part of the original EBenefits website (with its separate sign-in) is left behind so veterans still must access (and sign-in) to that site for access AFTER they have signed into Vets.gov. Then, accessing MyHealthEVet also has a separate sign-in, which you can use to validate who you are to access Vets.gov. And you also use ID.ME to verify identity for multiple sites. So many ways hackers can grab data from 20+ veterans doing business on the internet. Access exposure should be minimized! I thought that was what was happening when Vets.gov came online, but it wasn’t.
VA announced that EBenefits would be going away soon. Once it is gone, the ability to download documents submitted into the system will be gone as well. The new system also fails to link with the Board of Veterans Appeals, which would be ideal for vets to monitor appeal status, but that’s not there (it does say come back next month, but that never changes). IMO, instead of improving access, compared to the EBenefits site, Vets.gov actually reduced access to information veterans used to have access too.