Thomas Lynch M.D., Assistant Deputy Under Secretary for Health for Clinical Operations for the Department of Veterans Affairs www.va.gov appeared October 22, 2015 before the House Veterans Subcommittee on Health http://veterans.house.gov.
He said, “Beginning in 2010, the VHA www.va.gov/health started providing primary care through the patient-centric medical home model. By 2015, the VHA’s “Patient-Aligned Care Teams” (PACT) www.va.gov/health/services/primarycare/pact/index.asp were able to serve 7.2 percent of the VA’s primary care population and provided liaison to veterans needing specialty mental health care.
According to Dr. Lynch, “Patients who have been placed in well-implemented PACTs have lower hospital readmission rates, improved levels of patient satisfaction, and higher results when measuring quality of care. In FY 2015, VHA primary care completed 93 percent of new patient appointments and 97 percent of established patient appointments within a 30 day timeframe.
As Dr Lynch pointed out, “PACT includes services that are not generally present in private primary care practices. For example, integrated mental healthcare, social services support, coordination with non-VA care, prevention and wellness support, and management of complex multisystem diseases are now routine in VHA primary care practices.”
However, almost half of the VHA’s primary care practices are housed in medical centers, where many of these centers are aging and are not designed for efficient outpatient care. Therefore, cost comparisons with non-VA care models are difficult to accomplish.
VHA has formed a project team to analyze primary care costs within the administration and provide comparisons to other models. This analysis is going to take into account veteran population demographics and other current resource allocations.