Dear Jim,
Earlier this week, I was at a VA local area clinic. I needed to get current blood tests in order to judge how prescriptions are working, etc. Next week is the usual visit to the VA PCP to make sure that everything get's renewed, and so forth. While I was waiting, power was interrupted, due to an accident down the street. A truck hit and broke a concrete power pole. Service was restored by the power company about five hours later.
This brings up an often ignored issue concerning computers, computerized records, and the VA's "paperless" system using computers for treatment records, and so forth. (Not to mention little side issues, such as refrigeration used to store samples for lab analysis and a few drugs that are kept refrigerated.
The clinic did not have any sort of backup power source for anything, including all the computers and the phone system. This creates all sorts of problems, as you might imagine - ranging from inconvenience to potential data loss/corruption, and an inability to provide the usual medical services to a waiting room full of veterans.
I cannot help but wonder if this is typical of the new crop of VA clinics. If so, the VA has, in my opinion, screwed up again!
Another issue came up as well. It seems that the Atlanta VARO has instructed the Area VAMC and it's clinics to discontinue providing copies of C&P exams that are in the Veterans electronic medical records, and is now requiring the veteran to apply in writing to the VARO for the C&P records. The end result is that it can take months for the VARO to "get around" to sending a copy to the veteran, and quite possibly eliminates a veteran's capability to develop information countering unfavorable or incomplete C&P results in a timely fashion, before a decision is made.
This became obvious to me as I recently had a C&P on a Saturday, of all things, related to one of my "two year old" claims. The C&P showed up in E-Benefits as a "general" C&P, yet was specific for a back injury as far as I could tell. More confusing was that a few weeks prior to the C&P, I received a VA letter saying that the back injury claim was denied!
Even worse, the examiner was a VA RNP, not any sort of doctor with a specialty related to back injury, and the examiner that had a previous exam called incomplete by the Nehmer review process. The review board threw out the exam results, and awarded based upon medical records that an original denial had obviously ignored.
There is a favorable IMO in my file from a qualified specialist concerning the back injury. The VA originally denied the claim, calling the expert's medical opinion speculation.
Reply:
Any medical facility that treats a patient should have some sort of backup electrical system. That seems readily apparent to even a lay observer. That your clinic was more or less brought to a complete halt by a simple power outage is beyond belief. Or it would be beyond belief if we were dealing with any business other than VA.
Not much from VA surprises us these days.
It's been about 3 years ago that VA decided that veterans can't get copies of their C & P exams at the hospital where the exam is performed. Prior to that, the C & P exam was stored as a part of your electronic medical record. However, the C & P exam is not a medical record. When you have a C & P exam, you are not treated nor is there any relationship between you and the examiner other than the brief encounter.
So, the decision was made to remove C & P exams from the medical record and store them as a part of your c-file. Now you must ask for a copy from the c-file and that may take as much as a full year for that to happen.
One step forward, two steps back. Welcome to your VA.