Medical Care Information System of the Veterans' Administration

Telemedicine and information technology at the Veterans Administration Palo Alto Health Care System: serving patient care.

In the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), information technologies have been key to the delivery of high-quality medical care. The Veterans Administration Palo Alto Health Care System (VAPAHCS), one of the largest VA facilities in the western United States, is a new, 650,000-square foot, 961-bed tertiary care facility with seven outpatient satellite clinics that serve patients scattered over ...

Aging veterans: will they overwhelm the VA medical care system?

Using geographic information system tools to improve access to MS specialty care in Veterans Health Administration.

Access to appropriate and timely healthcare is critical to the overall health and well-being of patients with chronic diseases. In this study, we used geographic information system (GIS) tools to map Veterans Health Administration (VHA) patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and their access to MS specialty care. We created six travel-time bands around VHA facilities with MS specialty care and c...

Veterans administration health care utilization among sexual minority veterans.

According to recent census reports, nearly a million veterans have a same-sex partner, yet little is known about them or their use of Veterans Health Care Administration (VHA) services. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) veterans recruited from the community (N = 356) completed an on-line survey to assess their rates of VHA utilization and whether they experience specific barriers to accessing VH...

Estimating and reporting on the quality of inpatient stroke care by Veterans Health Administration Medical Centers.

BACKGROUND Reporting of quality indicators (QIs) in Veterans Health Administration Medical Centers is complicated by estimation error caused by small numbers of eligible patients per facility. We applied multilevel modeling and empirical Bayes (EB) estimation in addressing this issue in performance reporting of stroke care quality in the Medical Centers. METHODS AND RESULTS We studied a retro...