VHA uses actionable performance data to strengthen Veteran care with AI

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) works at a scale few healthcare organizations can match. One of three primary administrations within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), VHA oversees more than 150 medical centers and a nationwide network of outpatient sites, while also serving as a primary care provider, insurance provider and biomedical research institution.

Carrying out this critical mission — ensuring the 16 to 18 million Veterans they serve have access to quality care at every stage of their lives — depends on an expansive network of people and processes. The VA’s approximately 467,000 employees, clinicians, administrators, caregivers and service providers all play a key role in keeping care delivery moving.

In an inherently matrixed organization, coordination between these groups is imperative. VHA teams already had tools and data to manage complex work, from electronic health record modernization to patient flow and bed management. But they needed to take it a step further and find a way to operationalize that data.  

That is the opportunity VHA’s Chief Operating Office set out to address. By pairing its performance dashboard with Slack and built-in AI capabilities, the team created a real-time engagement layer that helps staff better understand what is happening across facilities, align on incident response, identify patterns quickly and share proven practices without slowing down the work already underway.

“Many of our staff members came to the VA because they were once patients, and wanted to affect change — wanted to make an impact on others,” said Josh Geiger, senior adviser to the VHA chief operating officer. “And this team has done just that. We have developed a lasting governance model that uses shared data to drive collaboration, streamline incident management, and work as one unified team to maintain facilities and deliver quality Veteran care.”

“The work the VHA is doing is about more than just efficiency, it’s about driving forward their mission to help ensure every Veteran receives the highest-quality care,” said Paul Tatum, EVP, Global Public Sector Solutions at Salesforce. “With Salesforce and Slack, the VHA isn’t just managing data – they’re operationalizing it with AI to empower employees with the instant, actionable insights they need to move from reactive reporting to proactive care.” 

An AI-driven, cross-functional platform built for action

VHA’s Chief Operating Office had already launched a dashboard to measure site and program performance across facilities, but the team needed to go deeper than basic reporting. Working with the VA Digital Transformation Center and Salesforce technology partner govSlackers, VHA expanded its dashboard into a real-time, agentic operating system built on Slack.

“It is a connective, performance management layer underneath that’s the real work,” said Geiger. “It enables us to cut costs, create efficiencies, and focus more time and energy on frontline Veteran care.”

When a performance metric, such as wait times or patient satisfaction, crosses a vulnerability threshold at any given care site, the dashboard automatically posts alerts into Slack channels, notifying working teams, site leaders and medical center directors. From there, staff can pull from shared templates and guidelines, bring in subject matter experts, link relevant documentation and coordinate next steps in one place. Permission settings help ensure the right people have access to the right background information, while Slack Canvases give teams a place to capture and pin key notes. If a response requires a facility visit, staff can also add notes, upload photos and share findings from mobile devices immediately, preserving the context of the moment instead of reconstructing updates later.

Slack AI adds another layer of speed and continuity. Teams can use it to summarize chat histories and attachments, identify urgent areas of improvement and surface past resolutions tagged as promising practices. Staff can also schedule recurring AI summaries to monitor progress without staying involved in every day-to-day exchange.

Additionally, Slack automatically creates dedicated channels and pulls in medical center directors and relevant subject matter experts to swarm on the issue. Slack AI then summarizes context and surfaces relevant information to accelerate triage and resolution. Once a case is resolved, the channel can be archived for future reference, helping teams reduce the time it takes to revisit similar issues or bring new staff up to speed.

VHA is also expanding Slack’s role as a broader engagement layer, including opportunities to collect employee feedback, support emergency communication escalation and connect with other mission critical applications. 

“When you operate at the scale of the VHA, complexity is often the biggest barrier to speed,” says Tatum. “By bringing AI directly into where work is already being done, the VHA is effectively streamlining complex, multi-layered coordination into immediate, actionable steps — dramatically speeding up response times and freeing up staff to focus on what matters most: the Veteran.”

A foundation for agency-wide learning

The integration is already creating measurable value. VHA’s Slack foundation is scaled to support 10,000 users, and more than 2,000 users proactively requested access when training began. It’s also giving leaders a clearer path to briefings, updates and expert input without unnecessary or redundant meetings.

“If someone needs to give a briefing on the state of a given medical facility or clinic, they can look at the action plan dashboard or directly in the channel and communicate with the subject matter experts instead of poring over a slide deck as a group,” said Geiger. “This has taken a process that used to require 18, 1-hour monthly meetings across 18 Veteran Integrated Service Networks (including medical centers) and compressed it all into a single, transparent self-serve location.”

For VHA, the result is so much more than a faster incident response model. It is a foundation for enterprise-wide learning that allows insights from any care facility to inform decisions and have outsized operational impact across the organization. Salesforce is helping teams keep pace with changing care dynamics, easily share best practices between teams, create efficiencies, and cut costs without sacrificing care delivery to maximize program budgets.

“This strategy has enabled the VHA to move faster, identify trends across pockets of information and bring the learnings or best practices from every incident to any program or facility,” said Greg Goins, acting chief operating officer of the VA. “It is another example of how we are serving as ‘one VA,’ channeling the buying power, leverage, research expertise and community insights that come from being the largest healthcare system in the country into hospitals that meet top standards nationwide.”

“What the VHA has created is a permanent library of institutional memory they can turn into AI action,” adds Tatum. “When you break down data silos and layer secure, AI-powered collaboration on top, a localized operational breakthrough can instantly scale to elevate the standard of care across more than 150 medical centers simultaneously.”

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