Veterans Health Administration Improves Patient Care With Clinical Collaboration Technology

In 2015 the Veterans Health Administration launched its Jive-powered “VA Pulse” system to improve collaboration across the sprawling healthcare network. The system is making a huge difference in all sorts of ways.

The VHA is one of the world’s largest healthcare systems, with hundreds of thousands of employees caring for millions of patients at thousands of facilities. Communicating across such a vast network, coordinating processes and managing transformation initiatives is a monumental task.

That’s why the VHA turned to Jive, rolling out a Jive-powered collaboration and communication platform in 2015. The system, called “VA Pulse,” is a central hub for information, connection and coordination among VHA management, clinicians and staff members.

Two years into the implementation, the impacts have been nothing short of dramatic. According to Masoud Rabie of Reingold, which partnered with Jive to plan and launch VA Pulse, the system has helped speed veterans’ access to care, streamline operations across the VHA and accelerate the adoption of new technologies, such as electronic health record (EHR) systems, all while cutting costs.

Transcript

VA Pulse is the Jive-powered digital collaboration platform for the Department of Veterans Affairs. And what that means is 365,000 employees across 2,000 locations have access at their fingertips to the right information at the right time, and they use that information to care for nearly 9 million of our nation’s most deserved heroes, our veterans.

So over the course of the last two years on this journey with the VA and Jive, what we’ve seen are remarkable results. Today, VA Pulse is being used by Veterans Benefits administrators to take a 9,000 page veterans claim manual, one which previously took nine months to issue a single change. And they’ve driven that process now down to less than three weeks, and they’re focused on taking that three weeks and moving down to just a matter of days.

At the same time, VA Pulse is at the heart of some of the most critical patient scheduling and access initiatives of our time, and as a result of those efforts today, 99% of veterans receive an appointment within 30 days. Nearly a quarter of them are receiving same-day access to care. And when you consider the fact that, last year, the VA delivered over 90 million outpatient visits, those are results at scale. Not just results, that’s social impact at scale.

VA Pulse is also being used to drive technological innovation for the VA in the commercial space. A typical hospital system will have to consume four to six years and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to deploy a new electronic medical record, or any clinical application for that matter. When you consider that, and the fact that the VA, through VA Pulse, is now deploying those very same updates to that record, clinical applications, but they’re doing it in 12 months. They’re doing it in a fraction of the time that their commercial colleagues are seeing and actually providing access to the tools that busy clinicians need to take care of patients.

But the heart of this tremendous change is the ability for an organization of the size of VA to really work virtually, without limits, without the confines of the brick-and-mortar buildings and hospitals and clinics which they may reside and really come together to solve the most pressing challenge, which is to have more time to do what matters most, which is care for our nation’s veterans