AN13 - Accelerating VA Innovation and Learning (AVAIL)

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is America’s largest integrated health care system with over 1,700 sites of care, serving 8.76 million Veterans each year.

For decades, the Veterans Health Administration has been a pioneer and leader in healthcare innovation. Today, wearable technologies, big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence, 3-D printing, and telehealth capabilities are driving significant and growing segments within the healthcare market. These emerging technologies, which are poised to transform care experience and service, can require enormous up-front investments and if not carefully designed, developed, and validated and/or tested in real-world settings, can yield little value to healthcare system or the patients it serves.

The Office of Healthcare Innovation and Learning (OHIL) leads VHA efforts to design, develop, and test new healthcare solutions, services (including funding models) and care models of care that can advance VHA’s mission to provide world class care and experience to Veterans. The office consists of three core programs: SimLEARN, including the National Simulation Center; The VHA Innovation Ecosystem; and The Center for Care and Payment Innovation. Collectively, these offices create a synergistic and advanced collaborative team which has successfully designed, developed, tested, and scaled multiple healthcare innovations used throughout the American healthcare system.

The Office of Healthcare Innovation and Learning is also part of VHA DEAN – Discovery, Education and Affiliate Networks – in which it shares a common mission with its sister offices, Office of Academic Affiliate and Office of Research and Development, to advance VHA’s urney to excel as  a learning organization that  amplifies innovation.

The AVAIL – Accelerating VA Innovation and Learning – contract serves as an opportunity to further VA’s long-standing tradition as a pioneer in medical innovation and VHA’s journey towards excelling as  a learning organization by offering VHA, and the Office of Healthcare Innovation and Learning, the availability to augment its ongoing design, development and testing efforts around healthcare innovation. The Office of Healthcare Innovation has identified 5 major innovation task categories or “growth areas” in which ongoing efforts are focused on: (1) Personalized Care; (2) Data Transformation; (3) Digital Care; (4) Immersive Technology; and (5) Care and Service Delivery Models. AVAIL will augment VHA and OHIL’s capacity, through subject matter expertise, to design, develop and test novel solutions and accompanying care and service models in a real-world setting (in this case, the Veterans Health Administration), ensuring that solutions create meaningful valuefor VHA clinicians, administrators, caregivers, and most importantly, Veterans, before being scaled into clinical production.