VA Straining to Keep Up With Claims, Study Says
184662
The Department of Veterans Affairs' system for handling disability claims is strained to its limit, and the Bush administration's  efforts to relieve backlogs will not be enough to serve veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, investigators told a House committee yesterday.
471291
CHICAGO - The American Medical Association called for more research into the public health risks of video and Internet games on Wednesday but stopped short of declaring them addictive.
40683
The Department of Veterans Affairs used prewar data to estimate the cost of caring for veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, a mistake that contributed to a $3 billion budget shortfall since 2005, government investigators say.
666539
A panel studying illnesses among the veterans has concluded that many suffer from neurological damage caused by exposure to toxic chemicals, rejecting past findings.
657466
Problems with treatment of wounded soldiers that created a scandal at the top U.S. military veterans' hospital are prevalent throughout the Army's health care system, lawmakers said on Monday.
449129
The thousands of soldiers wounded in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have overwhelmed the Army's system for evaluating their eligibility for disability benefits, leading to a near-total failure to complete such reviews in a timely manner, the service's inspector general concluded in a report...
393199
Veterans with diabetes get better care under the Department of Veterans Affairs system than some patients using managed care, U.S. researchers reported on Monday and suggested nationalized health care can work well.
700318
Lawmakers say they want to know whether a Veterans Affairs employee was being unfairly blamed for losing veterans&#039; personal information, citing newly disclosed documents showing he had received permission to work on the data from home.
313962
SIERRA VISTA - Their tales about access to medical care sound a lot like war stories. In a smoky Veterans of Foreign Wars bar in this military town, many Arizona veterans talk bitterly of waiting lists for
568024
NEW YORK  -The notoriously long hours worked in hospitals by newly graduated doctors, known as residents, were recently cut back in the U.S., and the move seems to have improved death rates for certain medical conditions at Veterans Affairs hospitals.
609370
Businesses may be spending millions on expensive security technologies aimed at thwarting data leakage and compliance violations, but many companies are still failing to sufficiently address access controls for protected information and IT systems.According to the latest report from Ponemon Institute, most IT workers readily admit that their companies are doing a sub-standard job of keeping tabs on the level of access available to employees, temporary workers, and independent contractors.In Ponemon's 2008 National Survey on Access Governance, based on interviews conducted with roughly 700 IT professionals, 78 percent of those people surveyed reported that their employers are not regularly reviewing policies or tools that control admittance to their systems or information.The situation has resulted in an environment where many workers retain the ability to view sensitive data or manipulate IT systems that they should not be able to access based on their job responsibilities, researchers said.Some 69 percent of those interviewed said that their companies' access policies were either enforced poorly or not at all, with only 30 percent of respondents stating that their organizations go to the trouble of validating their guidelines.The overwhelming lack of proactive efforts to keep a handle on issues of access are somewhat shocking based on all the attention being given to data security and compliance issues over the last several years, and many business could greatly improve their overall standing simply by improving their policies and enforcement capabilities, said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of research firm."Traditional approaches, including homegrown technologies and manual management processes, have proven to be fraught with failure and risk. Unless enterprises acknowledge business as usual is failing, we believe rampant access mismanagement will continue to plague organizations," Ponemon said. "When it comes to access rights, companies don't want to constrain workers and make their jobs harder, but they have to manage things in a more systemic way that look at the risk versus the benefits, and many organizations are obviously having difficulties with that."Approximately 55 percent of those participating in the survey said that their employers' ability to grant access based on a worker's role and job function is either poor or nonexistent, including 42 percent who said that their companies have no policy to manage things in such a manner.The rapid pace of change in the responsibilities among today's workforce is one of the biggest hurdles that companies struggle to overcome, said executives with Aveksa, a maker of access control software that sponsored the Ponemon report."This entitlement drag issue is a major problem. IT organizations are under pressure and often either valued or devalued by business based on how quickly they deliver access," said Brian Cleary, vice president of Marketing for Aveksa. "Clearly, the findings here show that that while companies are doing a good job of providing initial or changed access, there is no automated way to go back and make a determination to understand if a workers' current level of access is appropriate."Lessons learned from Jerome Kerviel Issues of access control are of fundamental importance to corporate risk management, perhaps best exemplified by the recent reports of the activities of Jerome Kerviel, a stock trader at French firm Soci?t? G?n?rale who is accused of losing nearly $8 billion of his company's capital in unapproved transactions carried out by circumventing rules built into the brokerage's IT systems.Had Soci?t? G?n?rale been actively monitoring the access controls for its transactional systems, Kerviel likely would have been caught long before he gambled away such a stunning amount of money, the experts contend.A major factor contributing to the continued loopholes in access management is a lack of support for improving policies and applying technologies used to govern the issue by senior management in many companies, according to the report. Some 74 percent of respondents indicated that senior management in their companies does not view access governance as a strategic security imperative. "It seems that the perception is that it's still tough to get senior executives to sign off on the necessary funding, but situations like Soci?t? G?n?rale may help prove how big of concern this really needs to be," said Ponemon.Another major contributor to the problem is the need for cross-organization collaboration, which complicates issues of access dramatically.And while 83 percent of those people responding to the survey said that collaboration among business units, audit and compliance groups, and IT security departments is vital to keeping their operations in line with government regulations, 57 percent said those teams never partner to oversee access issues."This has to be an area of great concern, because if companies consistently score poorly on compliance audits it's been proven that this actually starts to diminish their reputation and brands," Ponemon said. "And as more organizations suffer losses, there will likely be new regulations put in place that make it even harder to operate; most businesses I know don't want more regulations, but if more people fail to create their own controls, more regulators will get involved."
549221
Substandard care at a southern Illinois Veterans Affairs hospital may have contributed to 19 deaths over the past two years
517264
The U.S. Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs still aren&#39;t able to share complete electronic health records of military members and veterans despite working on a project for nine years, employees of the two agencies told a congressional committee Wednesday.While the two agencies have begun to share some text records, including discharge summaries and emergency-room reports, it won&#39;t be until 2008 before they can share vital signs of patients, laboratory data, and family histories, said Dr. Gerald Cross, principal deputy undersecretary of health in the VA&#39;s Veterans Health Administration.Officials from both agencies told the U.S. House of Representatives Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations they&#39;re making good progress, but issues remain. &quot;The work to make data computable between two different health-care systems is very complex and requires complete standardization of data,&quot; Cross said.And the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has yet to see a comprehensive plan from the two agencies to share e-health records, added Valerie Melvin, director of human capital and management information systems issues for the GAO. The GAO has issued multiple reports since 2001 calling for VA and DOD to improve their health records sharing, she noted.The agencies have made progress on short-term projects to share data between some health-care centers, she said.&quot;These exchanges are limited, as significant work still remains to achieve the long-term goal of a comprehensive electronic medical record,&quot; Melvin said. It&#39;s unclear how a number of ad hoc projects will fit into an e-health record program, she said.Lawmakers stressed the importance of getting a record-sharing program in place as wounded military members come back from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and will get medical service from both agencies. &quot;This is a critically important issue,&quot; said Rep. Harry Mitchell, an Arizona Democrat and subcommittee chairman. &quot;Thousands of our servicemen and women require and will continue to require significant medical care.&quot;While lawmakers called for the agencies to move faster, the GAO noted some progress. The agencies have developed repositories for health data and are starting to populate them with data, a GAO report said. Seven DOD and VA sites are using an interface to the data repositories, the report said.&quot;Much work&quot; remains before the e-health records sharing system is fully operational, the report said.The DOD and VA effort has been plagued by several setbacks in the past nine years. An interface for a data repository was delayed for more than a year at one point, and in July 2002, the agencies split the project into two initiatives after multiple delays.In July, after nine years of work, the two agencies awarded a contract for a consultant to conduct a feasibility study for a common inpatient health record system.Together, the two agencies have spent more than $1.8 billion on health records initiatives since 1998, according to the GAO.But officials from both agencies expressed optimism. Asked if they could share all data within a year, three officials from the DOD and one from the VA said they expect that to happen.&quot;We are all working toward the same end -- to provide the highest-quality care to our nation&#39;s heroes, past and present,&quot; said Dr. Stephen Jones, the DOD&#39;s principal deputy assistant secretary for health affairs.
683732
(InfoWorld) - The cybersecurity provisions in a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) bill approved by Congress late last week are in some ways too narrow and in others too broad, a cybersecurity group says. The Veterans Benefits, Health Care, and Information Technology Act, largely focused on veterans' health-care programs, includes a section on information security requiring the VA to report data breaches of any "sensitive" personal information, potentially including breaches where only veterans' names were exposed, said Liz Gasster, general counsel for the Cyber Security Industry Alliance (CSIA), a trade group representing cybersecurity vendors. The bill, passed by Congress late last week, requires the VA to report breaches of sensitive personal information to Congress and requires VA Secretary R. James Nicholson to create plans for notifying affected veterans, as well as offering credit monitoring and identity theft insurance to affected veterans. If the VA ends up notifying veterans every time a document with just names on it is lost, veterans may become numb to breach notifications that contain real dangers, Gasster said. Thirty-four enacted state data breach notification bills require that a name be coupled with other data, such as an unencrypted Social Security number, drivers' license number or financial account number. "Essentially, the loss of a list of names on a piece of paper constitutes a data breach under the law, which seems far too broad," she said. "Clearly, your name is not sensitive personal information." The VA announced in mid-May that a laptop and hard drive containing the personal information of 26.5 million military veterans and their spousesÂ had been stolen from an employee's home about two weeks earlier. Police later recovered the hardware, and VA officials said the personal information had not been compromised, but the breach set off a firestorm of criticism from Congress. In addition to its potentially broad definition of sensitive personal data, the bill does not exempt the VA from reporting data breaches if the information was encrypted, Gasster said. In supporting a national data breach notification bill, CSIA and other groups have called on Congress to exempt encrypted data from notification rules, saying the exemption would encourage companies and government agencies to encrypt more data. The lack of an exemption "seems like it deprives the benefit of encryption from the VA," Gasster said. Although the bill's language on personal sensitive information and encrypted data is too broad, in some ways the bill doesn't do enough to protect consumers, Gasster added. The bill only addresses VA data breaches, not breaches at other government agencies or private companies. CSIA and some consumer groups have pushed for a national data breach notification bill after a rash of breaches in early 2005, but Congress failed to pass a notification law. While the VA's large breach generated significant attention from Congress, other agencies have lost dozens of laptops containing personal information in recent years, and private businesses continue to have breaches, Gasster said. CSIA wants a bill that would require agencies and companies to take reasonable security measures to protect data, Gasster added. A spokesman for Senator Larry Craig, the Idaho Republican who sponsored the veterans bill, didn't return messages seeking comment on the CSIA's concerns.
82411
Veterans face serious inequities in compensation depending on where they live, an analysis by The New York Times has found.
599155
Claims and counter-claims by Vietnam veterans about John Kerry's military record:
294932
CHICAGO - The American Medical Association called  for more research into the public health risks of video and  Internet games on Wednesday but stopped short of declaring them  addictive.