There was no attempt to hide a 2008 investigation that confirmed falsified patient appointment logs were used to hide backlogs in care at the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Phoenix, the same practice that led to a national scandal earlier this year, the agency’s acting inspector general said Monday.
Richard Griffin, reacting to a story published last week by the Washington Examiner, issued a statement defending his office’s handling of the six-year-old investigation, saying the report could have been released if someone had requested it under the Freedom of Information Act.
The 2008 investigation confirmed schedulers at the Phoenix facility were deliberately using incorrect appointment dates to make it appear patients were being seen within agency-imposed deadlines.
That is virtually the same allegation that surfaced earlier this year, after whistleblowers from the Phoenix hospital told the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs that scheduling tricks were being used to “game” the system and hide backlogs.
The committee directed the IG to investigate the new claims.
The Sept. 2, 2008 report was deemed “restricted,” meaning it was not publicly released or provided to Congress until it was requested earlier this month.
So the problems it identified continued until the latest IG investigation on the claims determined the improper practices first identified in Phoenix were nationwide, “systemic” and potentially criminal.
The final report on the most recent investigation, published in August, did make a brief reference to the 2008 investigation in one of the appendices, confirming that it was “an accepted past practice” to alter appointments at the Phoenix hospital.
The six-year-old report was not released and no other details were given at the time.
The IG’s office initially refused to provide a copy to the Examiner, which obtained it through other sources and published it with the Oct. 22 story. The Examiner also filed a FOIA request Sept. 26. The IG officially released the report Monday.
The Examiner reported Oct. 6 that the IG had confirmed improper scheduling practices at VA hospitals nationwide for the past 10 years, but routinely dismissed them as training issues or failures by officials to understand agency procedures.
Griffin on Monday rejected “suggestions from the media and some members of Congress” that his office has downplayed its findings of improper scheduling practices.
“We encourage serious readers to consider the persistent alarms the OIG has raised on patient wait times and scheduling practices — alarms acknowledged on numerous occasions by Congress at oversight hearings,” Griffin said Monday.
One report singled out by Griffin involved a 2008 IG investigation ordered by a Senate committee into a whistleblower’s allegations that patient wait times were deliberately manipulated in New York and New Jersey.
The whistleblower claimed the former regional director ordered staff to falsify wait times to make it appear medical centers were meeting agency deadlines.
The IG confirmed the scheduling procedures were not followed, and that unofficial waiting lists were kept in violation of agency policies. However, the IG also found “no evidence that officials willfully manipulated waiting time information.”
At the time, VA executives promised new scheduling policies, software upgrades and better training to address the concerns in that report, Griffin said Monday.
“While 20/20 hindsight is a trait in common abundance, we could not predict six years ago the string of unbroken promises to fix wait times and scheduling problems,” he said.
As to the 2008 Phoenix investigation, Griffin said Monday that his office confirmed the improper scheduling procedures had been accepted in the past, and that “through a failure to properly communicate a requirement to adhere to policy, some employees continued this practice without management’s awareness.
“Several supervisors and schedulers reported the practice had stopped, but at different times, and both management and staff were confused as to the proper way to schedule appointments,” Griffin said in his statement.
Several schedulers told IG investigators in 2008 that they had been directed by supervisors to use the wrong appointment dates to hide delays, including one who said she had used one of the scheduling tricks an hour before meeting with the IG.
