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JULY 17, 2016

WE THE PEOPLE RADIO

WE THE PEOPLE RADIO

Hour 1 WE THE PEOPLE RADIO Hour 2 WE THE PEOPLE RADIO

"Big Reforms at VA"

Today's  guest: Scott Blackburn

Scott Blackburn is a US Army Veteran.  After completing ROTC at MIT, Scott served as an Armor and Signal Corps officer from 1999-2003. Scott was stationed at Fort Wainwright, Alaska and deployed overseas in support of Operation Freedom.  Scott’s service was cut short by a non-combat related back injury suffered in Kuwait and he was medically discharged.  The VA’s Vocational Rehab program helped Scott attend Harvard Business School (HBS) upon separation. 

After graduating from HBS in 2005, Scott became an associate at McKinsey & Company, the renowned worldwide management consulting firm. Scott developed an expertise in turning around and transforming the culture of large, often bureaucratic, Fortune 500 companies. Scott became a partner at McKinsey in 2011.

In November 2014, shortly after Bob McDonald was sworn in as Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Scott joined the team to lead the MyVA transformation. 

Scott grew up in Scituate, Massachusetts in a family with a rich history of military service.  Scott is one of five children, all of which are Veterans.  Scott recently moved to Bethesda, Maryland from Shaker Heights, Ohio where he had lived for the previous 10 years with his wife and three children.

     

 
 
If you have trouble with the document (above) you can view it online here:
http://www.va.gov/opa/publications/docs/myva_transformation_update_8x10.pdf

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Additional Information from Scott:
  1. Brain Trust.  This is a great example of how we are partnering with the private sector to solve some of the most important problems facing both Veterans and American Medicine.  The VA is actually the leader in brain research (as an aside…I, along with Secretary Bob McDonald and a few others, have actually agreed to donate my brain to science through Chris Nowinski’s Concussion Legacy Foundation http://concussionfoundation.org/; I was a football player at MIT at the same time Chris was a football player at Harvard before he became a WWE Super Star.  I played QB and got sacked A LOT; Chris therefore convinced me to donate).

 

http://www.blogs.va.gov/VAntage/27074/va-convenes-leaders-brain-health-advance-solutions-mtbi-ptsd-brain-trust-summit/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=9hgih6VhWLU

http://www.usa.philips.com/a-w/government/articles/vabraintrust.html

 

  1. Community Veterans Advisory Boards. http://www.va.gov/nace/myVA/index.asp. We have now established 65 around the country (goal is 100 by the end of the year).  We have an additional 61 communities that have expressed an interest and whom we are working with to put this in place.  I have attached a spreadsheet with the 65. 

    • In addition to those in the spreadsheet, in California we are working with Sacramento, Fresno and Loma Linda. 

    • In addition, we are speaking to Butler, Altoona and Erie in PA