Oscar Mike Radio – 513 - Joanne Frederick - Government Market Strategies

Let me, if I may, use an example from a guest that was on earlier this year.

Uh, the, it was a CEO of PDS Optical.

Okay.

And what that gentleman does is he has two plants, one in Florida, one in Kentucky, and they make eyeglasses for the VA.

Okay.

Now, just curious, how, how would your organization interface with PDS Optical? Because he was describing it as it was not a straightforward process initially getting into, you know, that system and becoming a VA preferred provider.

And-

Right

...

I was just incredulous.

I, I thought, "How hard could it be?"

Oh.

[laughs]

So explain some of the relationship and how that works.

Yeah, yeah.

So remember, massive system.

The Veterans Administration-

Okay

... is a massive system, right? It employs hundreds of thousands of people.

It has a very large central office in DC.

It currently operates on, uh, 18 VISNs, or Veteran Integrated Service Networks.

They're collapsing that 18 to 5.

Um, so there's a combination of centralized and decentralized, um, power spending contracts, et cetera, that happen.

Um, years ago, that was more decentralized.

Uh, this VA Secretary Ken Kaiser, um, really conceived of the, this sort of decentralized system because healthcare is local, and really we need to be able to, to make those decisions at the local level that best serve the people that are, you know, getting healthcare from that, um, that area.