The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) supply chain supports the largest integrated health system in the country, as well as the nationās most extensive telehealth system. VHA serves 9 million Veterans with over 300,000 clinical encounters daily from 1,200+ locations nationwide. Historically, VHA has utilized numerous disparate supply chain platforms to order, distribute, and manage its inventory of medical supplies and equipment.
VHA established the Health Enterprise & Logistics Management (HELM) program to guide the modernization of product lines across the VHA supply chain. The effort includes the evaluation of all viable supply chain platforms, the modernization of existing applications, and the future integration of those platforms into a single, data-driven, interoperable environment. To achieve its goals, the agency needed an interoperability platform that could intelligently link all VHA HELM systems and products to a single endpoint.
Working with our partners at VHA, the Cognosante team developed the VHA Logistics Integration Platform (VALIP). The innovative solution facilitates data interoperability between siloed legacy products, installed cloud applications, and anticipated future cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS)/Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) products.
Driven by standardized application program interfaces (APIs), VALIP uses data streaming, message brokering services, machine learning, and business intelligence integration to form a holistic view of the entire VHA supply chain. Collectively the integration services provide a standardized and scalable approach to integrate diverse applications, services, and data sources ā promoting interoperability, reusability, and overall agility.
The solution automates processes to rapidly create and update software in a securely hosted environment, creating a truly modern solution. This innovative platform design is also reusable and easily combined with other applications to create new functionality. The ābuild once, use many times overā model allows the solution to be quickly applied to other highly complex systems.
By integrating systems and data from across the VHA healthcare system, VALIP streamlines processes, enables better collaboration, and empowers data-driven decision-making for improved Veteran healthcare.
Since VALIP went live, the program has already yielded results:
VHA will be able to provide thousands of clinicians with timely access to the resources they need, while reducing costs and enabling future systems integrations. Over time, the VALIP implementation will redefine the way VHA moves medical supplies and equipment throughout its supply chain, reduce delivery times as well as purchasing and processing expenses, and improve returns on previous IT initiatives.