Government Healthcare Policy, Business and Technology

Flawed VA data includes 300,000 'pending' enrollment records for dead vets

Modern Heatlhcare: The Veterans Health Administration's Health Eligibility Center is not effectively managing essential data, causing a large backlog of applications and other problems with getting veterans healthcare, according to a report released Wednesday by the VA's Office of the Inspector General (PDF).

As of about a year ago, the VHA's enrollment system had about 867,000 records coded as "pending." About 35% of them were for veterans OIG investigators found to be deceased according Social Security data. "However, due to the data limitations, we could not reliably determine how many records were associated with actual applications for enrollment," investigators wrote in the report.

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