Cognosante, LLC today announced it has been awarded its third contract award to provide development and support services to VA’s Community Care Referrals and Authorization (CCRA) program. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) contract, valued at $217 million, includes a base year and four option years.
“Since the beginning of the program, Cognosante’s team has worked tirelessly to create a referral and authorization management system that makes it easier for Veterans to access healthcare in the community,” says Philip Dietz, General Manager of Cognosante’s Military and Veteran Health Business Unit. “We are incredibly proud of this program and are delighted to continue our partnership with VA for another five years.”
Under the original 2017 contract, Cognosante and its partners implemented a web-based referral and authorization management system, including Intersystems’ HealthShare Referral Manager, to standardize VA’s aging community care referral processes. Over the past five years, the portal has processed over 16 million referrals, averaging over 500,000 per month.
The CCRA team continues to increase adoption, grow the number of end users, and introduce enhancements. Improvements include streamlined workflows, systems integration, and an enhanced referral process outside the CCRA system’s original scope. New Cognosante applications include the Emergency Care Reporting Portal to automate the authorization and payment process for emergency care received in the community and the Clinical Viewer, which allows users to see a Veteran’s full longitudinal medical record without the need to request records from outside sources.
These enhancements helped VA move from manual, unrelated referral processes to a secure, streamlined solution, improving the timeliness of referrals, reducing administrative burden, and facilitating communication between community care staff and VA’s network of community providers.
“The CCRA Project is among the longest-running, high-velocity DevSecOps programs in VA,” says Erick Peters, Cognosante’s Chief Technology Officer. “One of the foundations of our DevSecOps delivery has been the evolution to a mature software factory. This repeatable, well-defined framework delivers speed to value for CCRA users. The approach dramatically reduced release times while enhancing quality and productivity.”
The CCRA program has received numerous awards, including the 2021 Pinnacle Award for Government Project of the Year and the 2021 FedHealthIT Innovation Award.
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