ST. CLAIRSVILLE — Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh Healthcare System provides veterans with services such as care through growing telehealth opportunities, including in Belmont County.

Community-based outpatient clinic business Manager Jocelyn Connelly has been in the position for eight years now, managing five outpatient clinics in the counties surrounding the main hospital in Pittsburgh.

Connelly got her undergraduate degree in English and pursued her master’s in business administration with a focus on health care. Before taking her current position, she worked in the same industry, health care of Veterans Affairs, but with the Privacy and Freedom of Information Act office.

Connelly has seen telehealth become a big trend within the past five years. She said Veterans Affairs continues at the federal level continues to pave the way with technology and innovation, which trickles down to VA Pittsburgh.

“VA as a whole, it’s the nation’s largest telehealth provider, and so over the past several years, we just continue to increase our telehealth adoption, which gives our patients the ability to receive health care on their own terms,” she said.

Connelly believes telehealth will continue to grow in the future, but the industry is also going to grow innovatively in how it provides care.

“We challenge the status quo of what was done maybe five, ten years ago and change our practices,” she said.

“So we’ve done that along the same concept as telehealth. We continue to expand care to our patients.”

VA Clinic patients used to drive from Belmont County to Pittsburgh to see one doctor, but now Pittsburgh VA is putting that one doctor in a car to drive to the Ohio Valley Mall, where patients can see the doctor in their own backyards.

The VA Clinic at the Ohio Valley Mall provides primary care services, labs, X-rays, podiatry, telehealth, orthopedics, behavioral health, physical therapy, orthotics, social work, dietitian and audiology. Connelly said the clinic is always looking to expand its services.

The Pittsburgh VA received surveys from its patients who indicated they don’t like driving to Pittsburgh to see their specialists, which is why it made specialty care available at the Belmont County clinic — to prevent veterans from having to drive to Pittsburgh.

“I think it’s important because we got that feedback from our vets that they don’t want to drive, get on a bus or travel an hour and a half down to Pittsburgh, sit in a waiting room for an hour for what might be a 15- or 30-minute appointment, and that’s where we’re challenging the status quo,” Connelly said. “… The historical way of doing that doesn’t make sense. Rather than putting those 10 vets on the bus, we can send that one provider out to the mall to provide that care.”

Differing from other health care, Connelly said VA health care has a lot of data on quality metrics and continually outperforms the industry with specific measures, with its care specifically veteran-centric.

“We design all our care around putting the veteran in the center of that care model,” she said. “And I think that our data has demonstrated that we can provide their care quicker to our veterans than the normal health care industry can.”

Connelly said Pittsburgh VA health care is a standing fixture in the community, from patient satisfaction scores that indicate veterans love to go to the clinics. She added that its trust score is the highest in the country, routinely above 90%. She believes the providers have specific training and understand the population of patients they see.

Connelly said health care is not going anywhere and continues to get more complex every day.

The Pittsburgh VA is funded with taxpayers dollars, which makes the public have a general interest in the services it provides and the quality metric scores and how it’s doing compared to non-veteran clinics.

“We are continually adopting. We want to make sure that we can provide care as our population changes,” she said. “… We have a growing women’s health veteran population, and so we want to make sure that we’re growing strategically. And our footprints in terms of what our space looks like, as well as the type of providers we’re hiring and the type of care we’re providing matches with how that community population is growing and changing in the future years.”