Medication copays to resume for veterans at Inland Northwest VA hospitals
Sep. 20—WASHINGTON — Thousands of veterans who get their medications from VA medical centers using a troubled new computer system, including the veterans' hospitals in Spokane and Walla Walla, will have to start making prescription co-payments in October after a two-year suspension of that requirement.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is sending letters and emails to notify all patients affected by the change, which will take effect Oct. 1, VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes said in an email. Those charges will appear on patients' November statements.
The department's hospitals and clinics throughout the Inland Northwest, in addition to facilities in southwestern Oregon and central Ohio, have been the testing ground for the electronic health record system developed by Oracle Health, formerly Cerner Corp., which the VA bought for $10 billion in 2018 to replace its existing system. For years after the system first launched at Spokane's Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center in 2020, it struggled to bill insurance companies and process prescription co-payments.
The change doesn't apply to the Lovell Federal Health Care Center, a joint VA-Defense Department hospital complex in Illinois where the system launched in March, because co-payments never stopped at that location. With the exception of that hospital in North Chicago, the VA has halted the system's rollout since The Spokesman-Review reported in June 2022 that system errors had contributed to patient harm.
Notably, Hayes said the VA will not bill patients retroactively for balances that accrued while the computer system was unable to process co-payments. The department is working with Congress and veterans' service organizations on potential relief for those outstanding bills, he said.
"Throughout this process, VA will communicate these updates to veterans to ensure that they have every opportunity to apply for debt relief," Hayes said.
In addition to Mann-Grandstaff, the Oracle Health system is in use at VA hospitals in Walla Walla; White City and Roseburg, Oregon; and Columbus, Ohio; as well as clinics attached to each of those facilities. Starting in November, Hayes said, pharmacy co-payment charges will appear on monthly statements just as they do at the rest of the department's 170 medical centers, which continue to use the VA's homegrown electronic health record system, VistA.
The department provides online resources for veterans with debt for co-payment bills at va.gov/manage-va-debt , and veterans who have questions about their billing statements can reach the VA Health Resource Center at (866) 400-1238 between 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. Pacific time, Monday through Friday.
Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
