December 20, 2001

  

Honorable Anthony Principi
Secretary
Department of Veterans Affairs
Washington, DC  20420 

Dear Mr. Secretary: 

          I want to commend the Department of Veterans Affairs for receiving one of five of Harvard University’s prestigious Innovation in American Government awards for your extensive work in patient safety.  I believe the National Center for Patient Safety has made tremendous strides to create cultural change in order to encourage reporting of medical errors within the Department’s health care system.  In further recognition of VA’s accomplishments, I wanted to inform you that I intend to offer articles that appeared in The Washington Post, p. A35 on Thursday, December 13 entitled “VA Medical System to Get Harvard Innovation Award” and in the Wall Street Journal, p. A1 on Monday, December 10 entitled “Vital Signs:  In the Drive to Mine Medical Data, VHA Is the Unlikely Leader—Oft Derided Veterans Agency Puts Vast Trove Online, Saving Time-and Lives—Handing In a Prescription” into the Congressional Record. 

The Department has certainly exposed itself to risks in publicly airing its record on medical errors, but this risk ultimately appears to be working in VA’s favor.  You may recall in the early days of VA’s patient safety initiative (February 9, 2000), the Subcommittee on Health held a hearing with Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health and Environment and Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations to assess the prevalence of medical errors and to review innovative approaches for addressing them.  The Committee’s early confidence in the Department’s patient safety initiative led us to advocate a high-profile role for VA as an example of “best practices” in this endeavor.