Recommendation: To help ensure that the military services' requirements for physician credentialing and privileging are consistent across the MHS, the Secretary of Defense should direct the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs and the Surgeons General of the military services to establish a DOD-wide process to identify and address existing inconsistencies between DOD's and the military services' physician credentialing and privileging requirements, including those inconsistencies we identified in this report.

Agency: Department of Defense
Status: Open

Comments: We will update the status of this recommendation when we receive additional information. As of September 2019, DOD has not provided information or documentation to address this recommendation.

Recommendation: To help ensure that the military services' requirements for physician credentialing and privileging are consistent across the MHS, the Secretary of Defense should direct the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs and the Surgeons General of the military services to establish a DOD-wide process to coordinate all current and future efforts to revise physician credentialing and privileging requirements.

Agency: Department of Defense
Status: Open

Comments: We will update the status of this recommendation when we receive additional information. As of September 2019, DOD has not provided information or documentation to address this recommendation.

Recommendation: To assure that information on a physician's clinical competence and practice history is documented and available to support credentialing and privileging decisions by Army MTFs, the Secretary of Defense should direct the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs and the Army Surgeon General to coordinate individual MTFs' efforts to establish mechanisms to collect and analyze data to evaluate physician performance and support performance assessments.

Agency: Department of Defense
Status: Open

Comments: We will update the status of this recommendation when we receive additional information. As of September 2019, DOD has not provided information or documentation to address this recommendation.

Recommendation: To assure that information on a physician's clinical competence and practice history is documented and available to support credentialing and privileging decisions by Army MTFs, the Secretary of Defense should direct the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs and the Army Surgeon General to clarify requirements for how MTFs document follow-up on peer recommendations, including who is responsible for documenting follow-up and where that documentation should be filed.

Agency: Department of Defense
Status: Open

Comments: We will update the status of this recommendation when we receive additional information. As of September 2019, DOD has not provided information or documentation to address this recommendation.

Recommendation: To assure that information on a physician's clinical competence and practice history is documented and available to support credentialing and privileging decisions by Army MTFs, the Secretary of Defense should direct the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs and the Army Surgeon General to clarify requirements for the information that physicians need to provide in their curriculum vitae (CV) so that MTFs can identify unaccounted for periods in practice history, as well as how MTFs should document explanations of any unaccounted for periods.

Agency: Department of Defense
Status: Open

Comments: We will update the status of this recommendation when we receive additional information. As of September 2019, DOD has not provided information or documentation to address this recommendation.

Recommendation: To assure that information on a physician's clinical competence and practice history is documented and available to support credentialing and privileging decisions by Army MTFs, the Secretary of Defense should direct the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs and the Army Surgeon General to establish requirements for MTFs to document significant events that occur during the review of a credentials file, including which types of significant events should be documented, who is responsible for documenting significant events, and where that documentation should be filed.

Agency: Department of Defense
Status: Open

Comments: We will update the status of this recommendation when we receive additional information. As of September 2019, DOD has not provided information or documentation to address this recommendation.

Recommendation: To assure that information on a physician's clinical competence and practice history is documented and available to support credentialing and privileging decisions by Army MTFs, the Secretary of Defense should direct the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs and the Army Surgeon General to establish a process to ensure that relevant information from the DPDB is documented in the credentials file.

Agency: Department of Defense
Status: Open

Comments: We will update the status of this recommendation when we receive additional information. As of September 2019, DOD has not provided information or documentation to address this recommendation.

Recommendation: To assure that MTFs are fully complying with DOD's and the military services' requirements for physician credentialing and privileging and implementing these requirements appropriately, the Secretary of Defense should direct the Surgeons General of the military services to establish and implement an oversight process to conduct reviews of a sample of credentials files to identify and address areas of noncompliance and incomplete documentation.

Agency: Department of Defense
Status: Open

Comments: We will update the status of this recommendation when we receive additional information. As of September 2019, DOD has not provided information or documentation to address this recommendation.

Recommendation: To craft an effective strategy, the Secretary of Defense should direct that the department's strategic plan for corrosion prevention and mitigation include developing clearly defined goals, outcome-oriented objectives, and performance measures that show progress toward achieving objectives (these measures should include such elements as the expected return on investment and realized net savings of prevention projects).

Agency: Department of Defense
Status: Open

Comments: DOD concurred with all recommendations for Executive Action in the report. DOD stated it "is committed to meeting the requirements of Congress and, to the extent compatible with its core mission, the positive recommendations of the GAO report." In DOD's Corrosion Prevention and Mitigation Strategic Plan dated November 2004, DOD stated that the working integrated product team for Metrics, Impact and Sustainment established as one of its objectives initiating studies and surveys to determine the impact of corrosion, pinpoint critical areas for concentration of prevention and mitigation efforts and to develop metrics to measure the effect of corrosion and results of prevention and mitigation efforts. In its 2005 update to the DOD corrosion strategic plan, DOD included a revised list of metrics for cost, readiness and safety and the associated outcomes that would result from the implementation of these metrics. In addition, the strategic plan included details of corrosion projects funded in 2005 and 2006 and the expected results of completing the projects in terms of achieving cost savings, increasing readiness, and enhancing safety. As of March 2019, Corrosion Office officials stated that they plan to include goals, objectives, and performance measures in the update to the DOD Corrosion Prevention and Mitigation Strategic Plan. The Corrosion Office's goal is to complete this plan update by the end of calendar year 2020 . We will monitor the extent to which DOD implements this recommendation.