Ensuring Access to Healthcare Services During COVID-19

VA’s Office of Information and Technology (OIT)

Client Challenge

Before the pandemic, the VA’s primary means of providing medical care to 19.2 million veterans was in-person visits with limited video capabilities. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the VA faced the daunting challenge of scaling telehealth to become its primary healthcare delivery method.

Our Solution

Veterans Engineering (VE), working within the VA’s Office of Information and Technology (OIT), architected a solution using VA Video Connect, hosted by Amazon Web Services. When demand for telehealth services skyrocketed, OIT launched Care2 Cloud for telehealth services within a month.

Client Impact

The VA enabled a 2000% increase in Veteran telehealth sessions. As publicly reported by VA, “As of June 2021, expanding service to the cloud supported over 10.5 million telehealth visits during the pandemic. The use of VA Video Connect was so successful that VA eventually moved all its video capacity to the cloud.” The cloud-based environment allows VA to scale up or down based on the demand.