Podcast: CIO Crossroads – VA Edition

Federal IT has taken the ultimate stress test during the COVID-19 pandemic – and has withstood the strain. Fortified by ongoing modernization efforts, agency CIOs and their teams have ensured the delivery of vital government services during unprecedented crisis. As the new normal paves the road to recovery, MeriTalk is chronicling those success stories. Today, we go into the eye of the storm with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the second-largest Federal agency and largest civil agency.
VA Outraces Demand in Virus Crisis – CIO Q&A
Even in the best of times, the VA has a huge mandate with a department budget of $220 billion – to provide healthcare, benefits, and services to support the nation’s nearly 20 million veterans. Its largest unit, Veterans Health Administration (VHA), offers healthcare at 1,440 facilities under an annual budget of more than $80 billion. The agency’s Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) delivers a host of other benefits and services for vets, and the National Cemetery Administration takes care of burial sites and services across the United States.
In these extremely trying times, VA has met the health crisis with a remarkable expansion of IT-driven patient care capabilities, thanks to modernization of key underlying service architectures. VA is innovating to outpace service demand during the coronavirus pandemic and to prepare for whatever lies ahead. Here’s some of that story by the numbers:
VA expanded its telehealth capacity tenfold, to handle up to 35,000 appointments per day. That includes a boost to 17,000 concurrent sessions thanks to cloud service expansion. Traffic on its va.gov website has spiked to 12 million hits per month, while users of its MyHealtheVet patient portal have risen 30-40 percent.
The agency scaled up telework capability from 10 percent to 35 percent of its 400,000-person workforce – and is prepared to go higher. It ordered 225,000 laptops and relocated half of its end-user operations out of VA medical centers to ensure continuity of operations. And by harnessing data in its business intelligence service line and corporate data warehouse, VA can provide a single source of truth around the coronavirus for the entire department, as well as build out its digital experience information and applications on VA.gov, thanks to Chief Technology Officer Charles Worthington and his team.
Its reward for a job well done? The VA’s score on the American Customer Satisfaction Index is up three points in the last three months, and eight points over the last year. That puts it on par with some of the most respected corporations in America.
In an exclusive interview with MeriTalk, VA CIO Jim Gfrerer covers how the agency prepared for unprecedented demand and continues on the modernization fast track.
MeriTalk: As the CIO of a large agency with a unique mission to support veterans, please tell us a couple of your largest priorities and successes in this COVID-19 pandemic. What are you proudest of and what surprised you the most?
Gfrerer: We’re proud of the rapidity and the agility with which all our employees and vendors came together to attack the problem. That wasn’t really a surprise, but I was very pleased with the commitment of our vendor partners and how much they really leaned into it. Everyone was scrumming on the problem really hard, trying to find ways in a disrupted supply chain to help us grow exponentially.
One of the things I stressed to our vendor partners early on at the most senior level was VA’s “fourth mission” – supporting national, state, and local emergency management, public health, safety, and homeland security efforts. I spoke with a senior leader at Cisco, and said, “I hope it doesn’t happen, but you may find one of your non-veteran Cisco employees or family members ends up getting t...