VA Health Connect: A Clinical Contact Center Designed to Enhance Access and Quality of Care for Veterans

The Covid-19 pandemic dramatically catalyzed use of telehealth and other virtual care modalities. Now, as virtual care delivery has become more widely accepted and increasingly used as a primary mode of care delivery, clinical contact centers (CCCs) are emerging as an important venue for access to a growing array of virtual care and other services. The Veterans Affairs Health System (VHS) has found that its call centers, which were historically used to offer patients inbound telephonic communication, have provided a foundation for regional CCCs using technology to offer patients bidirectional, multichannel communication (e.g., voice, video, text, chat) that improves health care accessibility, care coordination, and patient communication. In addition, the VHS has used the CCCs to leverage resources across care settings when managing public health emergencies. In May 2020, the VHS's Office of Veterans Access to Care led an initiative to modernize and consolidate the 87 individual Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) call centers into 18 regional CCCs serving all 171 VAMCs. Although still a work in progress, the Veterans Affairs CCC initiative — branded VA Health Connect — has expanded access to primary care, pharmacy services, emergency medicine, and mental health services. VA Health Connect is now responding to more than 40 million inquiries per year, with improvements in speed to answer, abandonment rates, and first-contact resolution. The authors describe some lessons learned in the implementation of VA Health Connect about how to involve people, processes, and technology to enhance patient services. The application of human-centered design can inform technology adoption and configuration of multichannel (omnichannel) communications. Critical to the success of VA Health Connect has been the incorporation of change management, effective mechanisms for deploying care delivery technology, and the importance of standardized data for performance improvement and organizational learning.