Leaders with the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center visited the VA’s Bend clinic this week to train staff on using the agency’s scheduling software, a dated system whose shortcomings were highlighted in the national scandal over long wait times.

A widely publicized internal VA audit released this month found that 70 percent of VA facilities had bypassed the problem-plagued software altogether and used a different format to schedule appointments. Following the audit’s release, staff members from some facilities within the Portland VA Medical Center system — including, apparently, Bend — requested additional help with the software.

“There was so many people who raised their hands and said, ‘We want to make sure we have our arms around the scheduling process,’” said Bernie Deazley, a spokesman for the Portland VA Medical Center, “and we said, ‘Great, we’ll send training out.’”

Administrators with the Portland VA Medical Center will visit all 12 facilities in the system to review their use of the software and provide additional training, Deazley said.

Deazley said he did not know which representatives with the Portland facility visited the Bend clinic, but said they did so on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday of this week. He said they also visited the Newport VA facility but could not name others.

Megan Crowley, a VA spokeswoman based in Vancouver, Wash., said the software the VA uses to schedule appointments, called the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), was implemented in 1985.

“Some of the schedulers had questions about scheduling, because obviously nationwide, it’s a confusing system and everybody is working really hard now to make sure that we’re doing everything exactly right,” she said.

Reached by phone, John Shea, operations manager of the Bend VA clinic, referred questions to the Portland VA’s media relations staff.

The VA report, in addition to a Government Accountability Office report in March, blamed the software for many of the agency’s scheduling issues. The March GAO report said the wait times themselves are unreliable when the VA’s schedulers aren’t recording information consistently.

“Some schedulers at VA medical centers (VAMC) that GAO visited did not record the desired date correctly, which, in certain cases, would have resulted in a reported wait time that was shorter than the patient actually experienced for that appointment,” the report stated.

The GAO report said some facilities complained of problems with scheduling timely appointments due to the “outdated and inefficient” software and staff shortages.

At a June 10 Senate hearing on veterans’ wait times, Stephen Warren, who oversees the VA’s Information and Technology systems, told senators the VA is actively looking for a new scheduling software system.

On Friday, Deazley said he was not familiar with plans for new scheduling software.

Data from the VA show that wait times at the Bend VA facility are shorter relative to other clinics in the system. Nearly 79 percent of the clinic’s 6,830 patients were able to get appointments within seven days of their request, and the clinic’s average wait time for the third next available appointment was 6.2 days. The VA uses the third next available appointment as a systemwide measure of wait times. New patients in Bend wait an average of 12 days to see a primary care physician, according to the VA.

The Portland VA Medical Center has brought on seven new physicians — five of them temporary — since last fall, which allowed the facility to reduce its wait list from 1,506 at the end of May to 467 today, Deazley said.

“So we’re doing lots of good things,” he said. “Are we perfect? No, but we’re making great strides every day.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0304,

tbannow@bendbulletin.com