20. Department of Veterans Affairs · Notable
Require public VHA reporting using Medicare ACO-style standards
Printed page 646 20. Department of Veterans Affairs
“Require the VHA to report publicly on all aspects of its operation, including quality, safety, patient experience, timeliness, and cost-effectiveness, using standards similar to those in the Medicare Accountable Care Organization program so that the government may monitor and achieve continuous improvement in the VA system more effectively.”
What has happened
- Not started
No requirement was created for VHA to report publicly on quality, safety, patient experience, timeliness and cost-effectiveness on Medicare Accountable Care Organization lines. VA’s public quality reporting in the window is what it already was: CMS Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings, which CMS — not VHA — has published for VA facilities since 2023, and the pre-existing Access to Care site. VA publicizes those ratings (78% of rated VA hospitals at four or five stars in the 2026 report) but publishes nothing new under them, and no ACO-style reporting standard, rule or directive was found.
No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
Negative search, 2026-09-01:
- Federal Register API, exact phrase
"accountable care organization"withconditions[agencies][]=veterans-affairs-departmentfrom 2025-01-20 — zero documents; the phrase appears in the Corpus only in CMS rules. - Corpus grep
accountable care organizationacross every Federal Register file, presidential actions, bills and public laws — zero. news.va.govpress-release search:transparency(nothing),quality,public reporting. The two quality releases found are https://news.va.gov/press-room/va-hospitals-earn-record-high-quality-ratings-in-2026-cms-report/ (2026-05-18) and https://news.va.gov/press-room/va-earns-top-scores-in-latest-cms-hospital-ratings-report/ (2025-08-29). Both report CMS’s ratings of VA hospitals rather than any new VHA reporting, so they are recorded here rather than as Evidence.
- Action
- create
- Object
- VHA public performance reporting
- ID
- 1766