Press Releases

– Today, Rep. Tom Barrett (R-Mich.), the Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Technology Modernization delivered the following opening remarks, as prepared at the start of the subcommittee’s oversight hearing on the work that needs to be done to improve access to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) community care program through VA’s enhanced scheduling technology to ensure veterans can efficiently get the healthcare they need.

Good afternoon. The Subcommittee will come to order.

When veterans are referred to community care, the scheduling process should be simple, fast, and focused on their healthcare.

But for too long, that has not been the case.

To schedule a community care appointment, VA staff must pick up the phone—again and again—often calling the veteran and the provider multiple times to schedule an appointment.

It’s a tedious, manual, multi-step process that can stretch over hours into weeks, delaying care for the men and women who earned it.

It’s inefficient—and it’s unsustainable.

Community Care is VA Care and will remain a critical component of effectively delivering veteran healthcare.

Approximately 2.8 million veterans used community care in 2023 alone and the outdated telephone method for scheduling these appointments is being crushed by the volume of requests from veterans for healthcare in their communities.

VA’s External Provider Scheduling, or EPS, is supposed to fix that.
And in many ways—it is fixing it.

EPS eliminates a large portion of the time and labor-intensive aspects of community care scheduling by giving VA schedulers direct access to provider’s appointment availability.

Through EPS, providers agree to share their scheduling grids with VA and allow VA schedulers to search and sort appointments by distance, drive time, availability, and more.

With available community care appointments on one screen, a VA scheduler can book the appointment directly with a community care provider with just one call to the veteran.

The average to schedule an appointment using EPS?

Under 4 Minutes.

Without having to rely on making multiple phone calls, some schedulers have been able to book up to four times as many appointments per day.

Spending less time scheduling each appointment means VA schedulers can be more efficient and veterans can get their appointments faster.

But here’s the problem: EPS is only active at about 20% of VA medical centers.

Some facilities have only had EPS for a few months.

While the program is adding new providers almost every day, there are a little under 5,000 providers currently in EPS and that number will need to keep growing if the program is going to reach its potential.

Provider participation is absolutely critical.

EPS is only a few years old, and I understand that it takes time to adopt new technology.

However, without strong leadership and commitment from VA, I fear that this will be yet another IT project that withers on the vine with unrealized potential to improve veterans’ lives.

Despite EPS’s promising results, the Biden Administration repeatedly placed roadblocks in front of the program.

In 2024, VA paused recruitment of community providers into EPS, deactivated sites where EPS was already up and running, and canceled plans to expand nationwide—all while blaming fake budget shortfalls.

Turning off EPS at active sites doesn’t just hurt veterans.

It burns bridges with the community providers who may not trust VA to follow through again.

The technology works, and this Subcommittee is not going to allow VA bureaucracy to stand in the way of its own success.

As the demand for community care continues to grow, VA can’t afford to continue scheduling millions of appointments over the phone.

EPS isn’t just about scheduling faster.

It’s about reducing administrative burdens on VA Staff who are fighting every day to keep pace with scheduling community care appointments on behalf of the veterans VA serves.

It’s about letting veterans make informed decisions by comparing VA and community provider availability.

It’s about honoring the basic promise that when a veteran needs care, the system does not stand in the way. That’s exactly what House Republicans are focused on.

With the Trump administration in place, I expect VA to tell us what their plans are to reverse the Biden administration’s protocols and expand this program to the rest of VA, in addition to what they are doing to bring more community care providers into EPS.

With strong leadership from the Trump administration, planning—and oversight from this Subcommittee—VA has a real opportunity to improve veterans’ lives with this technology.

Thank you all, again, for being here. I look forward to your testimony.

With that, I yield to Ranking Member Budzinski for her openin