Interview transcript:

 

Terry Gerton Your office has recently published the results of your audit on the homeless screening clinical reminder process in the Veterans Health Administration. Let’s start by having you explain what that process is and how it’s supposed to work, and what difference it makes for veterans who are perhaps experiencing housing instability.

Steve Bracci First, I do want to acknowledge that VA has prioritized ending veteran homelessness. There are several programs to help veterans who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. The homeless screening clinical reminder process really is an outreach effort. During health care visits, the screening tool, which is a series of questions, is used as a proactive way for VA to identify and help veterans who are either homeless or concerned about their housing stability. And this is really important because veterans may be unaware of the programs and assistance VA has to offer, or they might be reluctant to ask for help. So the screening tool prompts clinical staff to ask veterans if they have any housing concerns that they want help with. This then allows the clinician to make a referral to a social worker who can then connect with the veteran to discuss options and provide them with the assistance they need. This is, again, really important because it can have a major impact on veterans’ housing stability and their overall health and wellbeing.

Terry Gerton And VHA has established a target timeframe for that follow-up, right? Will you walk us through that?

Steve Bracci When a veteran says they want help, they are supposed to acknowledge that and act on it within seven days, but the goal is to actually resolve and have a conversation with the veteran within 30 days. But of course they recognize that it’s important to do it as quickly as possible.

Terry Gerton And so I guess the big finding, as you did your audit, was that in cases where the medical centers used both VistA and the Oracle Health System, almost 61% of veterans didn’t receive appropriate follow-up. What exactly is going wrong there?

Steve Bracci First, I want to clarify the 61%. That only refers to the veterans we were able to review at the VistA sites. The issues we saw at the Oracle sites were more focused on the lack of reliable data, which prevented our team and actually prevents VA from being able to view veterans’ cases and make sure that they’re being followed up on. So the 61% does refer to the VistA site. I just wanted to make that clear. But to answer your question about what went wrong, there were two key breakdowns that we saw in the process. First, the staff that screened the veterans, the clinicians, did not always refer veterans to social workers. Facilities have different ways of doing this and the processes varied across the sites we reviewed. For example, some facilities do a formal referral through the electronic health record using the consult process, while others use more informal methods, like sending an instant message to social workers. That’s an example. But we did find instances where these referrals just weren’t made. And as a result, no one reached out to the veterans to provide them with the assistance they needed. So that was the first part. The second part is the staff who received the referrals didn’t always follow their local procedures for conducting outreach with respect to how they tried to reach the veterans or how many attempts they made to reach the veterans. The intent of a follow-up is for social workers to have an actual interaction with the veteran and to have a conversation, identify their needs, and then they can provide the appropriate intervention. But we found instances where there was no interaction at all and it was just a letter was sent, or an email. So there was no way to ensure that the veterans’ needs were actually being met.

Terry Gerton Homeless veterans can be amongst some of the toughest folks to actually contact. They may not have a reliable mailing address. They may have a predictable phone number. What are the contact mechanisms that the referral team is supposed to use to reach them?

Steve Bracci Whatever method possible. They try to reach them using a telephone number. They try email. They try text messages. I think that’s not something we really touched on too much in our report, but it does show the importance of trying multiple times to reach a veteran before closing out that referral.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Steve Bracci. He is a deputy assistant inspector general for the Office of Audits and Evaluations at the Department of Veterans Affairs. So you mentioned the 61% with VistA cases, but you also said with the Oracle Health System, they have unreliable data. I’m interested — it seems like two different IT systems, but I’m presuming they have sort of the same SOPs across the network, regardless of what IT system they’re using. What makes the difference in terms of reliable follow-up reports, or root causes?

Steve Bracci I think it’s just a matter of how reliable that follow-up report is. We found with the VistA sites that the report was accurate as far as identifying the actual veterans who screened positive and wanted help. It was the actual follow-up part of that that was missing, whether or not the veteran had actually been reached and whether or not the follow-up had been completed. So that was the piece that was missing with the VistA sites. With the Oracle sites, we just found that it wasn’t accurate at all. The actual report was somewhat unusable with identifying whether or not veterans had actually screened positive and then any sort of follow-up had been done. So, that was a distinction there.

Terry Gerton So you’ve got really two fundamentally different, systemic problems. Talk us through your recommendations. How do you want VA to tackle this issue?

Steve Bracci That’s a challenge for VA is when you have two systems — anytime you have IT systems and there need to be updates, that is a challenge. I think it’s just a matter of doing what they need to do to make sure that the systems are accurately capturing the data and reporting the veterans who need help so that that follow-up can be taken.

Terry Gerton How did VA respond to these recommendations, and who’s responsible for fixing the problem?

Steve Bracci I do want to acknowledge that VA concurred with our recommendations and they developed a responsive action plan for each one. So that’s important. Carrying out the action plans will require significant effort because not only are we dealing with two different systems, but we’re dealing with many VA medical facilities and each facility can do things a little bit differently. So identifying what works and taking steps to standardize that process across the system will take some effort. So that’s an important piece. Like I said, the recommendation about ensuring reliable reports could require additional coordination because we are dealing with VistA sites and Oracle sites, and it will require significant communication and collaboration across program offices and VA stakeholders to get the reports where they need to be. So ultimately responsible, you know, I mean the VA secretary is ultimately responsible for everything within VA. But you have many different program offices that are relevant in this case, and you have many different VA leaders also.

Terry Gerton Does VA have, say, a task force lead for this project?

Steve Bracci Not that I’m aware of.

Terry Gerton Let’s assume that they figure out how they’re going to orchestrate all of those different pieces that need to respond to this. What do you want veterans to know about how this might change their interaction or their service when they’re screened for homelessness or housing insecurity?

Steve Bracci I want veterans to know that they can expect to see improvements to the process. That’s why the OIG is so important: Our oversight focuses on topics and programs and services that are important to veterans. Our team does a really good job. When we conduct an audit, our team does really good job communicating with the different program offices and with VA leadership throughout the project. So when our report is issued, it doesn’t come as a surprise. So that communication, I think, is really important and it gives VA the opportunity to start making improvements and corrective actions immediately. And we’ve found that that is the case, that they take those meetings and they take our findings and our recommendations seriously. So I want veterans to know that. And, you know, I think VA as part of their response to our report, they have planned corrective actions that should be implemented by August of 2026. So if they follow through and they take action and they complete those plans, then veterans will see improvements to this process.

The post Recent VA audit finds major gaps in homeless screening, prevention first appeared on Federal News Network.

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Interview transcript:

Terry Gerton Recent DOD news revealed that the military says it’s short 20,000 cyber professionals, and we’ve heard a number probably bigger than that by an order of magnitude for the commercial sector. What are the biggest obstacles that you think are hindering building this cyber workforce?

Ryan Dunford I think some of the biggest obstacles to building that workforce come from the idea that the cyber industry is extremely complicated or that it requires some sort of superior intellect for somebody to get into, that it’s not accessible. I think another part is that the education feels out of reach for some, like they don’t have the ability to get the certifications or the schooling required in order to break into the industry.

Terry Gerton So you’re making the point that the veteran population would be a great target for building the cyber workforce if we could recruit more veterans into these kinds of positions. Tell me more about the connections that you draw between military experience and cyber work.

Ryan Dunford Well, from my own experience, when I was recruited into the Marine Corps, I took the ASVAB. They gave me a choice of jobs and to be honest, at 19 years old, I just picked the one that sounded the coolest and I had no IT background or anything like that. But what it allowed me to do was get myself the IT training, the experience, the on-the-job training, everything that would then serve me later on in my career when I got out into the private sector.

Terry Gerton And for veterans who may be leaving the military without military IT experience, how did they even begin to think about connecting to a cyber opportunity?

Ryan Dunford For somebody who’s been in the military, but not in military IT, the transition is not as hard as you would think. There is schooling out there, there is education out there for you, and the skills that you learned as an active-duty military member can serve you across the cyber industry in so many different ways. The inherent leadership training that we get as active-duty military members, the attention to detail that is stressed so much, operational excellence, all the great things that make you good at being a soldier, sailor, Marine will make you good at your job in the private sector as well. The only thing you need to bridge the gap is to just reach out and get the training.

Terry Gerton We talk a lot, in terms of veteran employment and transition, about those soft skills, those leadership skills, that flexibility and initiative. But cyber really does have some technical skill requirements. Where should folks be thinking about looking for the right kind of training? Are they just credentials? Are they degree programs? Is it all of the above? If someone’s interested in this, where should they start?

Ryan Dunford Without formal experience, there’s a few different places you can start. There are industry certifications from some of the big names like CompTIA, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, AWS. Those certifications are going to serve you extremely well. They are highly visible to employers on a resume and can help establish that you have put in the work and have the technical knowledge required to make it in the industry.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Ryan Dunford. He’s a former Marine and lead infrastructure engineer at Bit-Wizards. Let’s change the focus a little bit. We’ve been talking about veterans so far. But for folks who are still on active duty and maybe separating soon, what programs should they be looking at it? Are you engaged with the SkillBridge program or other sorts of GI Bill-funded certifications that folks might engage with to help prepare them for cyber opportunities?

Ryan Dunford First and foremost, listen to the transition assistance folks. That was a big part of transitioning out of the military. It’s easy, at the end there, to kind of blow it off and just get super impatient to get out. But the transition assistance program for the military is excellent and helps a lot. I would say to those people: Start looking around for colleges. There are a couple colleges out there that offer IT industry certifications to go along with your degree, and that just makes you even stronger in the workforce. There are programs out there that will allow you to leverage your GI Bill in order to break into the cyber field, whether it be in IT administration or cybersecurity or anything like that. All of those opportunities you have in front of you, take your time, find the one that you want, and pursue it with the same determination you do any other mission.

Terry Gerton You started by saying people are sometimes intimidated by the complexity or the technology in a cyber job. Why don’t you take just a minute and tell us what you think it means to work in cyber? What would people be doing day to day when they come into the office?

Ryan Dunford It’s a very diverse field. There’s a lot of choices out there as far as what you want your career to be and the path that you could take. I personally, as a lead infrastructure engineer, work a client-facing job where every day I’m taking calls from different clients with different types of IT problems. The biggest benefit to that is that I get a diverse challenge every day. But I have to maintain those customer service skills. I have maintain a sense of duty to the client. A lot of those things that I learned in the military. And then among the small team that I work with, having the adaptability and the leadership skills that I’ve learned in the military has also benefited me. If you want to specialize, you absolutely can. There are places you can go where you could, if you wanted to be a cybersecurity professional and just work in that security sector, you absolutely could do that. If you want to just work in the background and work in programming or software development or something like that — that’s all available to you. Just because you feel like the part of it that you’ve seen might be a little bit intimidating or that you don’t quite understand it, I’d still encourage every veteran to look into IT as a possible career because there could be something out there for you. There’s a little something for everybody; some of it more on the customer service and soft-skill side, some of the more on the highly technical side. But it’s all there for you.

Terry Gerton So should someone just go to Indeed, for example, and search “cyber jobs” and start reading about what they require? Is that a good way to get a feel for it?

Ryan Dunford A lot of the skills, like I mentioned before, are already there. A lot active duty military members have a lot of skills necessary to make it in the IT world. But that’s definitely something that can help. Go out to the job boards, start looking at the job postings that are out there. One of the challenges that veterans run into when they transfer into the private sector is the language barrier. The military has its own language, the acronyms and the different terminology that gets used for different things doesn’t always translate directly into the private sector. So it can be extremely valuable to read those job postings. Find out what terminology is being used in the private sector — what one thing means and how to associate that with the corresponding military term. Those sort of things will serve you really well when you’re out there looking for those jobs.

The post The Pentagon’s short more than 20,000 cyber pros. Veterans could help fill the gap. first appeared on Federal News Network.

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