VA Increases Telehealth, mHealth Budgets
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
The VA’s 2016 $56 billion budget includes $1.2 billion for telehealth efforts.
The VA is ramping up mHealth efforts for fiscal year 2016, earmarking $1.2 billion of its overall $56 billion budget request for telehealth measures. In a press briefing, VA Chief Information Officer Stephen Warren explained that 55 percent of the VA’s projected $4.1 billion IT budget would be dedicated to customized medical programs, 20 percent for adding new features and functionality to the Veterans Benefits Management System quarterly, and 19 percent to maintain the enterprise IT services, according to Fed Scoop.
The budget request for fiscal 2016, which begins October 1, also includes $63.3 billion in advance funding for 2017, a routine inclusion to help protect the health budget in the event of a government shutdown, according to the Military Times. Additional, $598 million is earmarked for continued construction and improvement projects, and $36 million to strengthen customer service programs at online access and call centers.
“One priority identified by VA officials is mental health treatment. The VA has earmarked $7.2 billion in its budget for mental health treatment in a primary care setting and to provide ‘more intensive interventions in specialty mental health programs’ for severe or chronic mental health disorders,” explained mHealth News Editor Eric Wicklund. “That may include telehealth services, a key tool in ongoing projects to treat veterans with PTSD and other stress-related conditions.”
The funding is important because the VA expects to service 9.4 million veterans via VA healthcare in 2015, including 1.4 million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. The budget also specifies funds totaling $1.2 billion for telehealth technologies to increase access to medical care for veterans with chronic conditions who live in remote or rural areas, and $446 million for women's health programs, an increase of 8.3 percent.
Broken down further, the budget earmarks $30 million to interoperability initiatives and $203 million for upgrades to the VA's EMR system, with $183 million tabbed for VistA Evolution and $20 million for the Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record system.
According to mHealth News, Warren said one of the VA's priorities is to streamline the MyVA portal, which enables veterans to access VA services from any location and on a variety of devices. A large part of that initiative involves breaking down legacy systems that store data in silos. The goal, he said, is to “move to veteran-focused outcomes vs. an organizational-focused outcome, collapsing down to that single cyber portal … and a single unified experience.”