Lanterna Rally

Author: U S Government Accountability Office (G

Publisher: BiblioGov

Published: 2013-06

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 9781289138165

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) resource allocation system, focusing on the: (1) extent to which VA resources are distributed equally among VA facilities; and (2) causes of unequal resource allocations among VA health care facilities. GAO found that: (1) the VA resource allocation system enables VA to identify potential inequities in resource allocations and forecast facility workload changes, but VA has made only minimal changes in facilities' funding levels; (2) there is a significant difference between comparable health care facilities' operating costs and patient workloads; (3) VA has not used its resource planning and management system (RPM) to ensure that resources are allocated to facilities within the same priority category; (4) VA excluded over $4 billion of its medical care appropriation from the RPM process during the first 2 years of RPM because it wanted to give VA facilities more time to adjust to the reallocation process and large budget changes; (5) the RPM system does not address veterans' unequal access to outpatient care; and (6) VA plans to reallocate a larger portion of its fiscal year 1996 facility budgets based on the RPM process and implement a decision support system to better compute the costs of specific services provided to each patient.