Walla Walla VA Medical Director Scott Kelter offers new insight on Enterprise VA Clinic changes
By Garrett Christensen on Friday, May 16th, 2025 in More Top Stories Northeastern Oregon News
ENTERPRISE – In March of this year, the VA announced a shift in its veterans’ services options for Wallowa County Residents. Notably, the then current Enterprise VA clinic was to close and be superseded by a new VA Telehealth Program, known as the ATLAS Program (Accessing Telehealth through Local Area Stations), to be run out of the Winding Waters Clinic in Enterprise.
For anyone in Wallowa County that may not be familiar with the transition, Elkhorn Media Group’s Dan Thesman recently spoke with Walla Walla VA Medical Center Director Scott Kelter on the reasoning behind the change. The following is a transcribed segment from the May the 15th KUMA Coffee Hour Podcast wherein they discussed VA clinics in the region and reasoning for the transition in Enterprise:
DT: “My guest this morning is Scott Kelter. He is the director of the Walla Walla VA Medical Center. And Scott, I wanted to have you take a minute and talk about kind of the bigger picture. While everybody that’s in Walla Walla and maybe College Place and Milton-Freewater is familiar with the Walla Walla VA Medical Center, you’re kind of the overall seer of all the other VA services and clinics and such in other outlying areas, La Grande, Enterprise, and so on.
I know the Enterprise community, that facility recently closed, and some people didn’t quite understand why and what happened. But talk a little bit about how you’re kind of the mother hen, if you will, and everything else falls under you, and that it’s not just centered around Walla Walla proper, but you have a far-reaching responsibility outside of Walla Walla for VA and all the different benefits and services that the VA provides.”
SK: “Sure, thank you Dan. So when we talk about the Walla Walla VA Medical Center as a whole, that refers to several other clinics as well clinics that were within about two hours or so from Walla Walla.
So, we’re also responsible for the are delivery in a telehealth clinic in Boardman, Oregon, as you mentioned, the telehealth clinic in Enterprise, Oregon, that recently closed, as well as community-based outpatient clinics in La Grande, Oregon, Lewiston, Idaho, Richland, Washington, and Yakima.
And so you asked about the clinic in Enterprise. The clinic in Enterprise was our smallest clinic and served the smallest number of veterans. And for those veterans, they’re a little bit more than an hour away from the clinic in La Grande. Some veterans from that community already chose to go to La Grande. Many veterans in that community already chose to receive care in the community.
As I mentioned before, there are certain parameters where the VA will pay for veterans to receive care from other community providers if we don’t offer that service or if we don’t offer that service within a certain distance or time. And so veterans in Enterprise were eligible to receive that care in the community benefit because they’re more than an hour from other locations. And our community clinic in Enterprise was primarily telehealth.
We had a provider that would go out there usually once every three months for face-to-face visits, but he would see his patients primarily via telehealth visits. So what we’re offering there now is we have asked each veteran whether they want to receive their care in La Grande, whether they want to come to Walla Walla, whether they want to continue to see that same provider via telehealth. And we also are partnering with Winding Waters in Enterprise to try to set up what’s called an ATLAS Clinic, and that’s essentially a space that will be within the Winding Waters building, but it will be a space dedicated for veterans to come in and do a VA Veterans Connect appointment, so a telehealth-type appointment from that building, again, to their same provider or providers that they have been seeing. So that’s what we’re trying to do in Enterprise.
Again, it might take a little while to get that ATLAS Clinic set up. In the meantime, the veterans in that area are still eligible for all those other types of care, but veterans within an hour of any of those other sites of care that we mentioned all fall into the Walla Walla VA Medical Center area of responsibility.”
Listen to the full Coffee Hour Segment at: https://omny.fm/shows/coffee-hour-podcast/may-15-walla-walla-va-medical-center
Find our previous coverage the VA transition in Enterprise at: https://elkhornmediagroup.com/changes-coming-to-wallowa-county-va-telehealth-clinic-veterans-invited-to-town-hall/
