Pursuit's Take
VA health care was added as a GAO high-risk area in 2015 because of concerns about VA’s ability to ensure the timeliness, cost-effectiveness, quality, and safety of veterans’ health care.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has taken action to partially meet two of the five criteria GAO uses to assess removal from the High-Risk List (leadership commitment and an action plan), but it has not met the other three (agency capacity, monitoring efforts, and demonstrated progress).
To address its high-risk designation, additional actions are required of VA, including: (1) demonstrating stronger leadership support as it continues its transition under a new administration; (2) developing an action plan to include root cause analyses for each area of concern, clear metrics to assess progress, and the identification of resources for achieving stated outcomes; and (3) implementing GAO’s recommendations, not only to remedy the specific weaknesses identified, but because they may be symptomatic of larger underlying problems that also need to be addressed. Until VA addresses these serious underlying weaknesses, it will be difficult for the department to effectively and efficiently implement improvements addressing the five areas of concern that led to the high-risk designation.
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