mr. mcintyre, i enjoyed our meeting earlier this week. i appreciate your being here today. >> thank you, mr. chairman. chairman, ranking member members of the community, we are committed to making the program work and provide veterans timely and geographically accessible quality care using care in the community whenever necessary. i we will talk i will talk shortly about what we're doing and the help we need to make it happen. first i want to talk about access to care. most mornings at 9:00 a.m. for the last year's senior leaders from across the department gather to focus on improving veterans access to care. we concentrate on we concentrate on key drivers of access including increasing medical center staffing by 11,000, adding space, boosting care during extended hours and weekends and increasing staff productivity. the result, 2.5 million more completed appointments inside the va this year than last. of relative value units to make common measure of care used to measure care delivered across the industry is also up 9 percent. another ano

mr. mcintyre. it was quick. you were encouraging to put in an authorization of what? >> i would look at the limitation on 60 days for authorized care under choice. it puts people who have cancer in a position where we need to move them back and forth between the va medical center. it takes a person who might be with us under choice because of a pregnancy and does the same. and i don't think that was intended. i think it was intentional that there were parameters drafted around it but the notion that certain types of care would have to move back and forth between the va medical center and downtown is neither efficient or effective in the delivery of care. >> all right. i don't want to spend too much time on this but this is very important, i think, from listening to your testimony and watching everybody's head bob. you want to expand the 60-day authorization to a longer period of time? >> i think i would leave it to the clinicians -- >> okay. you won't get off with that. >> okay. i got it, sir. what i would do is evaluate which types of care are there needed authorizat

mr. mcintyre i appreciate the help that you gave me and we look forward to hearing first from sloan gibson. >> thank you mr. chairman. ranking member blumenthal and the committee, we're committed to making the choice program work and to providing veterans accessible quality care using care in the community whenever necessary. i'll talk shortly about what we're doing and the help that we need from congress to make all of that happen. first, i want to talk very briefly about access to care. most mornings at 9:00 a.m., for the last year, senior leaders from across the department gathered to focus on improving veterans access to care. we've concentrated on key drivers of access, including increasing medical center staffing by 11,000 adding space, boosting care during extended hours and weekends by 10% and increasing staff productivity. the result 2.5 million more completed appointments inside va this year than last. relative value units a common measure of care delivered that measured care delivered across the industry are also up 9%. another focus area for us inimproving access has been incre

mr. mcintyre and miss hoff meier, if you'd like to comment from your standpoint as to what's going on? >> when we first set up the program, we put -- we gave every patient in the system an appointment in our system and put them on the choice list so that they could decide at any point this time which direction they wanted to go. we have learned through experience over the last six months that that doesn't work. it's not -- it doesn't help the veteran, it doesn't help us and, quite frankly it's not cost-effective. so we have the pilots. we have just started these pilots to see how this goes and how we can improve those business processes but we are moving, quite frankly, in the direction of at the point of service offering the veteran -- finding out what is the appointment we can provide in the va offering the veteran that appointment, or offering them the opportunity to go outside through the choice program, and at that time if the veteran chooses to go out, then our staff much like they do outside of choice for all of our other purchase care appointments will work directly with triwes

mr. mcintyre, i enjoyed our meeting earlier this week. appreciate your being here today. >> thank you, mr. chairman. chairman, ranking member members of the community we are committed to making the program work and provide veterans timely and geographically accessible quality care using care in the community whenever necessary. i we will talk i will talk shortly about what we're doing and the help we need to make it happen. first i want to talk about access to care. most mornings at 9:00 a.m. for the last year's senior leaders from across the department gather to focus on improving veterans access to care. we concentrate on we concentrate on key drivers of access including increasing medical center staffing by 11,000 adding space, boosting care during extended hours and weekends and increasing staff productivity. the result, 2.5 million more completed appointments inside the va this year than last. of relative value units to make common measure of care used to measure care delivered across the industry is also up 9 percent. another another