The VA's pharmacist-led anticoagulation units use diligent monitoring and constant overview of patient compliance to keep Warfarin patients’ International Normalized Ratio at a safe level. Despite that success, their future role may be in question because of a new class of medications that doesn’t require routine laboratory monitoring as well as a move toward home-monitoring for Warfarin.

WASHINGTON, DC—The fastest growing segment of patients treated at the nation’s VA facilities are those with four or more chronic diseases, increasing from 15% to 22% in an eight-year period ending in 2008, according to a recent study.

BETHESDA, MD—There is a pressing need to understand what the rehabilitation trajectories are going to be for those servicemembers returning with mild and moderate TBI, according to Kris Siddharthan, PhD, a health services researcher at the James A Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa, FL.

WASHINGTON, DC—Patients taking warfarin, a widely used blood-thinning pill that requires careful dose monitoring, have similar outcomes whether they come to a clinic or use a self-testing device at home, according to a recent VA study.  The findings, published in the October 21 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, are good news for heart patients who live far from clinics or are homebound.

BETHESDA, MD—“So you see a diagnostic error. That error occurs at the sharp end of medicine,” declared Dr Mark Graber, chief of medical services at the Northport VA Medical Center. “You look at where the diagnostic error occurred, you can always find a clinician, or sometimes two, to point the finger of blame at.