Should veterans know that their civilian healthcare provider cares about their service and its impact on their health after military service?

If your answer is YES, please link to the below articles to learn more. More importantly, share these with those you know via social media and give your "positive" take on what this means to you as a veteran. Especially, share these links and your thoughts with healthcare professionals you know and why this is important to you as a veteran.

• https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/ [login to see] 5292/en/Vizient-Publishes-Field-Guide-Improving-Care-Veterans

• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/warrior-centric-health-featured-vizients-field-guide-care-van-name/

To my colleagues on RallyPoint. We, as veterans, have a right to high quality healthcare and for healthcare systems to understand how our service has impacted our healthcare.

Throughout this great nation are great people, especially in healthcare, yet veterans are not often identified by healthcare at the point of care in the commercial realm, especially if they are not using insurance (aka TRICARE) that immediately identifies them as veterans. Here is this quote from Kate Van Name, COO of Warrior Centric Health:

“Nine out of ten Veterans currently receive some level of healthcare in the private sector and more than 70% receive ALL healthcare from private healthcare facilities, which are woefully unprepared to diagnose and treat them. This unpreparedness conveys to a loss in effective patient/provider communications…. Private healthcare systems are largely unaware of this issue—only 57 percent of hospitals screen patients for military service. And even those who are aware aren’t prepared to deal with it— only one in ten actually use the data they collect to identify care gaps.”

Ask yourself: Is my healthcare institution / provider specifically trained to deal veteran healthcare issues in my community? Then ask: How would I know this?

Think of the above questions this way: We own them! Meaning, if our expectations of commercial healthcare (aka non-VHA) does not expect them to ask the question about our military service then how can they help up? More importantly, how can we as a community of >18 million veterans ever expect to receive the kind of quality care if we do not create the demand by setting the expectation for healthcare systems they need to ask everyone if they are a veteran vs relying on evidence of insurance (aka TRICARE) as the indicator. Also, if you have not the January 2018 RAND report entitle "Ready or Not" please do so. Here are two links:

- Link 1: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2298.html
- Link 2: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10006.html

In the aforementioned link regarding the VIZIENT Field Guide for improving Veteran Care a little deeper digging was needed to reveal that only the Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN) sought to understand the data insights generated by an inpatient and an outpatient study that revealed their actual veteran patients were more significant than they first thought. This further identified opportunities to create sustainable opportunities to identify gaps in care to veterans to support continual quality improvement where such opportunities that were in plain view but unknown until the need to know was pointed out.