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U.S. Representatives Debbie Dingell (MI-12) and Tim Walberg (MI-07) today introduced legislation that would enhance transparency requirements at VA hospitals. Hospitals that receive reimbursement from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) must report a variety of quality measures to the National Healthcare Safety Network, including surgical infections. The VA Transparency Enhancement Act will help improve VA reporting requirements by bringing them more in line with other hospitals. It would also require them to report on surgical cancellations and the impact on patients for the first time.

“Patients have a right to see infection rates and other issues impacting quality of care at VA hospitals,” said Dingell. “Improving transparency at the VA will help ensure we are meeting the quality standards we owe our veterans. It will also help Congress understand when, where, and why infections are happening or surgeries are cancelled so we can respond to changing conditions. Should infection or cancellation rates rise, Congress and the public need to know about it. We also need to understand whether cancelled surgeries are affecting the health of a veteran. Ensuring our veterans have timely, quality healthcare is a critical responsibility of the Congress, and this is one more very important step to ensure they do.”

“Keeping the faith with America’s veterans is a sacred responsibility and one we must be unwavering in upholding. This bipartisan bill will enhance transparency and reporting requirements at VA hospitals—similar to those already followed by public and private hospitals—to ensure we are doing right by our nation’s veterans. When barriers to timely, high quality care arise, we must work together with urgency to get to the bottom of and solve them,” said Walberg.

The VA Transparency Enhancement Act would require the Department of Veterans Affairs to report quarterly to Congress on the number of patients who contracted an infection as a result of a surgery and the number of surgeries cancelled or transferred by the VA. While the VA currently provides completed and pending appointment data from local VA medical facilities to the public monthly, the VA does not publically release data on rates of infection or cancelled or transferred surgeries. 

Since late 2015, an ongoing contamination issue at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System has led to surgeries for veterans being intermittently cancelled or moved to different hospitals because particulate matter was observed on sterile surgical equipment. In November, Dingell wrote a letter to then-director of the Ann Arbor VA Robert P. McDivitt questioning the cancellations. When surgeries resumed, she and Rep. Walberg again wrote the VA seeking assurances that surgeries were not being conducted in unsafe conditions. 

Since being alerted that the problem continues to persist, Dingell and Walberg have been in constant communication with Ann Arbor VA leadership. They met with Acting Director Eric Young and members of the senior leadership team over the weekend, and in the process, learned that VA hospitals are not required to report on surgical infection and cancellation rates, and other reporting requirements can be improved as well. Dingell and Walberg are committed to ensuring the VA has the resources needed to find the source of the contamination and fix the problem.