Mixed results at Robley Rex Hospital in Louisville but mostly better than average.

I recently commented about the reaction in Washington to revelations that veterans trying to get appointments at VA medical centers were facing long waits and that utilization data for at least a handful of centers had been altered to make them look better than they were. I was subsequently asked how our local Robley Rex VA Hospital in Louisville stacked up against others. While I have heard good things in support of the Louisville VA from veterans at public hearings, and while the hospital has done well in national accreditation and quality surveys, I had no specific information about waiting times. The release of national patient access data from the Veterans Administration in Washington gives us something to go on and will be presented below. In brief, our hospital has little to be ashamed of, but the data as presented are not easy for me to interpret.

One of the pitfalls in analysis of data-dumps like this one is that without knowledge of exactly what is being counted or measured, how items are defined, or the operational measures used to assemble the data; the robustness of any conclusions may be compromised. My lack of day-to-day working knowledge of how appointments are actually made at VA hospitals or how the various lists of waiting times were compiled for this report limits my confidence. Nonetheless, assuming the data from the various medical centers has been collected in the same way, an overview and some rough comparisons seem reasonable. Continue reading “Patient Access Data at Veterans Hospital Medical Centers.”