Year 2000 Computing Crisis

Actions Needed to Ensure Continued Delivery of Veterans Benefits and Health Care Services Gao ID: AIMD-99-190R June 11, 1999

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on its recommendations to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for completing key actions necessary to ensure continued delivery of benefits and health care services to veterans beyond January 1, 2000.

GAO noted that: (1) the Veterans Benefits Administration and Veterans Health Administration (VHA) have not yet completed testing of their mission-critical systems to ensure that the systems can reliably accept future dates; (2) VHA has not yet completed assessments of its facility systems; (3) VHA's pharmaceutical operations are at risk because the automated systems supporting its consolidated mail outpatient pharmacies (CMOP) are not yet year 2000 compliant; (4) VHA does not yet include the CMOP systems in its quarterly report of mission-critical systems to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB); and (5) VHA does not yet know if its medical facilities will have a sufficient supply of pharmaceutical and medical-surgical supplies on hand because it does not have complete information on the year 2000-readiness of these manufacturers.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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