; 38 U.S.C. 1701 note) required an independent assessment of the hospital care, medical services, and other health care furnished in medical facilities of the Department of Veterans Affairs. That assessment provided valuable insight into needed reforms at the Veterans Health Administration, particularly with respect to governance, operations, data and tools, and leadership. (b) Sense of Congress (1) In general It is the sense of Congress that the Secretary of Veterans Affairs should take every effort to address as many of the reforms described in subsection (a) as practicable. (2) Elements In making reforms described in subsection (a), it is the sense of Congress that the Secretary should do the following: (A) Improve the overall management of the Veterans Health Administration as follows: (i) By ensuring that the Administration provides the decision making rights, authorities, and responsibilities to the lowest appropriate level. Such decision making rights, authorities, and responsibilities should be articulated by level, organization, and role, and should be standardized to the extent possible while allowing local flexibility based on local needs. (ii) By clarifying the roles and responsibilities of the Central Office of the Administration, the Veterans Integrated Service Networks, the medical centers of the Department, the community-based outpatient clinics of the Department, and other organizational entities, while prioritizing providing support to the field. (iii) By reassessing all of the directed metrics and policies of the Central Office of the Administration to ensure those metrics and policies add sufficient value to patient outcomes. The Secretary should eliminate the metrics and policies that do not add sufficient value to patient outcomes. (iv) By reviewing the implementation of the Patient Aligned Care Team staffing model of the Department, including by determining areas for improvement, to examine— (I) causes of gaps in facility benchmarks between actual, maximum, modeled, and external benchmarks