Media contact: Jeff Schrade (202) 224-9093 

(Washington, DC) - U.S. Senator Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), the Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, and other members of the committee will meet Wednesday to hear testimony and review a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on information technology efforts within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

The committee will also review how well the Department of Defense and the VA are integrating their health care records.

Late last year Congress passed the Veterans Benefits, Health Care, and Information Technology Act of 2006, which was signed into law on December 22, 2006. The legislation strengthened security procedures at the VA and required the VA to report its progress to Congress. In addition, at the urging of Congress, VA accelerated the reorganization of its entire IT bureaucracy from a decentralized model under the control of the three separate VA administrations, into the current centralized model under the direction of the Assistant Secretary for Information Technology.

The hearing will be held Wednesday, September 19, in room 562 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, starting at 9:30 a.m. Eastern. It will be broadcast live on the Committee's website and available for viewing later http://veterans.senate.gov. Audio may also be available - during the hearing only - at http://www.capitolhearings.org.

PANEL I

• Honorable Robert T. Howard, Assistant Secretary for Information and Technology, Department of Veterans Affairs, Accompanied by:

-- Dr. Paul A. Tibbits, Deputy Chief Information Officer, Office of Enterprise Development, Office of Information and Technology

-- Ray H. Sullivan, Director of Field Operations, Office of Information and Technology

• Valerie Melvin, Director, Human Capital and Management Information Systems Issues, U.S. Government Accountability Office
• Stephen M. Lucas, Director, James A. Haley VA Hospital and Clinics, Tampa, FL
• Kim Graves, Special Assistant to the Under Secretary for Benefits, Department of Veterans Affairs
• John P. Glaser, Ph.D., Vice President and CIO, Partners HealthCare

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