How the Department of Veterans Affairs uses Slack in a new partnership

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) isn’t embracing the slacker lifestyle—the Department of Veterans Affairs’ sprawling healthcare system doesn’t have time for that—but it does plan on using Slack to make its operations more efficient.

Specifically, the VHA announced a partnership with Salesforce to roll out Slack in March for its healthcare environments, right before it resumes its electronic health record (EHR) modernization rollout. The agency is now live with several of the new capabilities, with more rolling out in the coming weeks and months, Kara Sibbern, corporate communications manager at Salesforce, wrote in an email to IT Brew.

According to Josh Geiger, senior advisor to the COO at the VHA, the partnership could increase efficiency through pulling information together in one, centralized location.

Meanwhile, Salesforce claims that using Slack as an agentic operating system—i.e., a platform for managing multiple AI agents—will help healthcare professionals identify urgent improvement areas, summarize chat histories, and upload real-time information through mobile devices, among other improvements. Sibbern wrote that Slack is able to monitor metrics, detect issues, and automatically assemble people and context without humans needing to initiate every step.

“The reason why we use Slack is because it’s an integration technology, so it’s agnostic to whatever EHR, whatever data set, whatever platform, because I want one central thing that can talk to everything,” Geiger said. “When I look at future state changes, it’s a system that, when I’m gone, should still be in place and be able to carry us into the future, to be able to work with new adaptations of technology.”

An agentic operating system to rule one system. The VA has struggled with modernizing platforms used by healthcare professionals and patients in the past. Just last year the Government Accountability Office released a statement outlining the VA’s unsuccessful attempts to update the EHR to manage the healthcare needs of veterans and their families. Other issues have included improper sharing of sensitive information on cloud apps, an inability to address a backlog of claims, and more.

Paul Tatum, EVP of solutions engineering for the Salesforce global public sector team, acknowledged that new tech tools haven’t always resulted in a streamlined experience.

“What VHA has available to them with Slack is the ability to build in both integrations to their legacy system,” Tatum said. “You think of it as sitting across these systems. They don’t have to move the data; we have a zero-copy architecture with the data so they can use it to collaborate, they can use it to connect, they can build workflows around it.”

Human-tech. Rather than forcing VHA healthcare workers to use a system that they’re unfamiliar with, Tatum said, Slack’s conversational nature and “human interface” can help reduce any challenges that could impede ease of use.

Tatum pointed to boosted collaboration among healthcare workers, accurate results from AI agents, and consolidation of information as benefits to this new technology within the VHA’s tech ecosystem. “We firmly believe that humans and AI, the augmentation of humans with AI, is really the future, and so that’s where Slack has really shown up,” Tatum said.