WASHINGTON — Funding for veteran healthcare continues to increase in the Obama administration’s latest budget proposal, but legislators had some pointed questions about how well VA is tracking its spending for medical supplies and services.

WASHINGTON — For more than 50 years, the VA Schedule for Rating Disabilities (VASRD) has been the mechanism for determining how much disability compensation is provided to veterans. While the system has seen minor adjustments over time, a sweeping revision has never been attempted — until now.

WASHINGTON — Army Maj. Kendall Mower expected his wife’s fourth birth to go as smoothly as the births of his three other children. His newborn died shortly after birth, however, as a result of poor patient-safety practices at an Army hospital, he said.

WASHINGTON — A new study suggests the military’s current screening and diagnostic tool for concussion lacks utility when it is used more than 10 days following an injury.

On average, more than 30 times a day across the VHA, patients outside the operating room require emergency-airway management. It is literally a life-or-death situation, as failure to establish an airway can result in brain damage or death within minutes.

STONY BROOK, NY --While burn pits have been the focus of a controversy for years about causes of high rates of respiratory illnesses among military personnel deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, evidence increasingly paints a more complex — and far more difficult to address — picture.

JACKSONVILLE, FL— The residency program at the Naval Hospital-Jacksonville was named  Clinical site of the year by the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in 2011, but the program’s director scoffs at taking personal credit.

For the past five years, VA has struggled to implement a systemwide weight-reduction program to combat obesity rates among veterans receiving care. More than one-third of veterans receiving care qualified as obese in 2006, and VA believed that lowering obesity also would lower weight-related illness, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis and hypertension — all of which occur in high rates among VA’s population. ¹

WASHINGTON — What should FDA’s role be in the continuing globalization of the prescription drug market, and should the agency be obligated to consider the health of the American pharmaceutical industry in any decisions it makes?

NATIONAL HARBOR, MD — The term “human performance optimization” (HPO) emerged from a 2006 DoD quadrennial review which identified a need to promote warrior wellness and apply emerging technologies to human performance.