WASHINGTON – Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald, under pressure to be more transparent about how VA measures wait times for veteran care, on Monday said the government should be more like Disneyland.
Disney doesn’t track how long visitors wait in line for attractions at its theme parks to decide if they liked their experience, he said. So the VA should not be held to the same standard for medical appointments for veterans.
“When you go to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? Or what’s important?” McDonald told reporters at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.
“What’s important is, what’s your satisfaction with the experience?”
Disney was one example he cited of how private sector companies look more closely at whether their customers are satisfied overall than at the time they have to wait on line for service.
“What I’d like to move to eventually, is that kind of measure,” McDonald said.
His comments were quickly denounced by top Republicans on Capitol Hill, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., as insensitive to veterans, whose long waits at VA hospitals — and the agency’s attempt to cover them up — exploded into a scandal two years ago.
Whistleblowers and the agency’s watchdog revealed that VA employees in Phoenix and at other hospitals across the country were putting appointment dates in the system earlier than the real ones, which were later on the calendar and exceeded the reasonable time a veteran should wait to see a doctor. The scandal cost former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki his job.
Disney, it turns out, does collect and analyze extensive waiting time data, which it considers core to its overall customer experience. The company has a system that manages the information.
In the scandal’s aftermath, VA says that wait times for care have shortened in many places, thanks to more resources and a focus on outsourcing care to private doctors. But a recent report by the Government Accountability Office criticized the metric the agency uses to calculate how long a veteran waits for an appointment or procedure. That measure is called the “preferred date,” but does not count the wait from the time a patient first calls or sends an email to schedule an appointment.
But McDonald said the wait from the day the appointment is created, which varies widely among VA hospitals, “is not what we should be measuring.”
“We don’t think it’s valid,” he said Monday. “We have a very large health-care system. I don’t want to create more measures that are irrelevant.”
He said the date the appointment is made “is not the ultimate measure of satisfication.”
“You would have a veteran who waits two days and one who waits eight days” for a medical appointment, McDonald said, but the one who waited longer might feel better about the care he or she received.
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Lisa Rein
