Urgent Care Popular
The MISSION Act also established a new urgent care benefit, which 400 veterans reported using in the VFW survey. Fully 89% indicated that they would recommend community urgent care to other veterans and 82% of those who used the benefit said they were satisfied with it.
The urgent care benefit has been quite popular, MacDonald noted, with veterans making more than 93,000 visits in the first five months of the program’s operation. The network now includes more than 6,400 urgent care sites across the country.
Information from those urgent care visits feed back into the VA healthcare system as part of the unified approach. “We watch the visits closely, look at the data by geography,” MacDonald said. “When we see a veteran is going to urgent care frequently, we make sure the veteran’s home facility reaches out and makes sure everything is alright or brings that veteran into care, if needed.”
Closing the loop on care appears to be working to improve veteran satisfaction with VA care and to ensure that critical data isn’t lost when veterans choose community care.
“Community care has always had a role in caring for our nation’s wounded, ill and injured veterans, but its purpose is to augment, not replace, the continuity and continuum of care that only the VA can provide,” Schmitz said. “And with our seventh report, our nation’s veterans agree.”
