The effects of the Veterans Health Administration's Referral Coordination Initiative on referral patterns and waiting times for specialty care.

Objective: To investigate whether the Veterans Health Administration's (VA) 2019 Referral Coordination Initiative (RCI) was associated with changes in the proportion of VA specialty referrals completed by community-based care (CC) providers and mean appointment waiting times for VA and CC providers.

Data Sources/study Settings: Monthly facility level VA data for 3,097,366 specialty care referrals for eight high-volume specialties (cardiology, dermatology, gastroenterology, neurology, ophthalmology, orthopedics, physical therapy, and podiatry) from October 1, 2019 to May 30, 2022.

Study Design: We employed a staggered difference-in-differences approach to evaluate RCI's effects on referral patterns and wait times.