In 2019, the Foundations for Evidence-based Policymaking Act of 2018 (Evidence Act) was signed into law with bipartisan support. The goal of the law is to encourage cabinet-level federal agencies to use evidence to guide, strengthen, and justify their policy- and budget-making decisions. The Department of Veterans Affairs and its administrations, including the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), are required to comply.
The Evidence Act requires certain formal deliverables be submitted to the Office of Management and Budget on routine cadences. However, beyond the law’s formal requirements, VHA developed the strength of evidence checklist to strengthen the legislative and budget proposal processes. The goal is to ensure that VHA offices are using evidence to justify any changes they’re proposing to current law and/or budget lines. VHA considers this the Evidence Act “in action.”
The Partnered Evidence-based Policy Resource Center (PEPReC) spearheaded the checklist’s development and wrote a short policy brief about it. In the policy brief, PEPReC discusses the domains of evidence included in the checklist, how VHA uses it in the legislative and budget proposal process, and the routine improvements made in its early years.
Read the policy brief here.
PEPReC, within the Veterans Health Administration and funded in large part by the Quality Enhancement Research Initiative, is a team of health economists, health services and public health researchers, statistical programmers, and policy analysts who engage policymakers to improve Veterans’ lives through evidence-driven innovations using advanced quantitative methods.
