Spotlight on Women Cyberseminar Series- 20 -Veterans’ Administration

January 31, 2012

# Veterans’ Administration

**Spotlight on Women Cyberseminar Series**

**January 31, 2012**

Kristen Mattocks:  Well again we wanted to thank everybody for joining our conference today.   This is a really exciting presentation for us to put together, Laurie and I, and so let me give you a bit of an overview in terms of what we will be doing in the presentation today.  

So the focus of this presentation is really two fold.   It is an overview of existing reproductive and gender-specific healthcare research in the VA.  I am going to be talking about a lot of different people’s research from across the country.  And you will see that at the end of the presentation I have given the names and email addresses of all of the people that whose research we’re sharing.  So if you have direct questions about any of the methodology in the research or you want to connect with those researchers at the end their full information is at the end.  

So I will be talking generally about research focusing on contraception, pregnancy, some gender-specific conditions and some reproductive health preferences and experiences of women veterans.  At that point in the presentation I will be handing over the reins to Dr. Laurie Zephyrin, who will be giving a great presentation really focusing on some emerging VA reproductive health programs and policies.  And at the end we both we would like to tell you a little bit more about the reproductive health working group that we are that we co-facilitate.  And it is certainly open to any researcher within the VA or across the country who are interested in looking more at reproductive health research in the VA.

So because we learned that people really like poll questions we thought we would start off with the poll questions.  And we just want to get us a better sense of our audience in terms of what best describes your position at the VA.  Are you a researcher, a clinician, an administrator, or a policymaker or other?  And I will give people a chance to fill that in there. 

Moderator:  Great.  Thank You.  So I am going to go ahead and launch that first poll question now.  And everyone can just go ahead and click the circle that responds closest to your answer.  

And we have had about half the people respond already.  We will give it a few more seconds so that everybody has a chance to answer.  

All right, we have had about eighty-five percent of people answer, but they are still coming in.  So we will give everybody a moment.  And Laurie was able to connect to the audio so, yes, Laurie you can just enter your audio pin and then un-mute your line whenever you are ready to speak.  

Okay we have had almost ninety percent response rate.  I am going to go ahead and close the poll and share the results.  And so it looks like we have twenty percent researchers joining us, forty percent clinicians, fifteen percent administrators and policymakers and twenty percent other.  So thank you to everyone for responding.  

Kristen Mattocks:  Great.  That’s wonderful.  And so moving on again to  just one other poll question, we just want to get a sense of before we start this presentation we want to get a sense of the degree of familiarity you have with reproductive or gender-specific research and/or policy at the VA.  

And so you have five choices there.  You can be very familiar, moderately familiar, somewhat, a little bit or not at all.  And this will just give us a better sense of our audience before we go forward with this whole presentation.  

Moderator:  All right.  We’ve had about three fourths of the people respond so we’ll give it just a few more seconds.  

Okay. We’ve had about eighty-five percent of people respond.  So I’m going to go ahead and close out the poll now and share the results, looks like we have six percent that feel they are very familiar, twenty-one percent moderately familiar, twenty-three percent somewhat familiar, twenty-eight percent a little bit familiar and twenty-two percent not familiar at all, so very evenly distributed across the options. 

Kristen Mattocks:  Great, wonderful.  Well that actually makes our presentation even a bit more fun because it gives us an ability to educate people a little bit more on what’s going on in the VA right now.  

So one of the first things we wanted to distinguish for the audience was though the broad title of our presentation is Reproductive Health in the VA.  We wanted to just share some of the work that we’ve been doing in differentiating reproductive health from broader issues of gender-specific conditions. 

So as you can see from the screen here reproductive health is a state of fiscal, mental and social well-being and not nearly the absence of reproductive diseases or infirmity.  It deals with all reproductive processes, functions and all stages of life.  

So with the changing demographics of women veterans coming to the VA, we are finding more and more that we have to address the full spectrum of reproductive health needs among women veterans.  And so a group of researchers, largely at VA Palo Alto, Susan Frayne, Sarah Friedman, as well as Lori Bastian and myself and I have called some other folks, have really begun to focus more carefully on gender-specific care that we provide to women veterans.  

And I have given you a listing here of some of the gender-specific conditions we are talking about.  So when we say gender-specific care we are talking about care that is primarily received by and targeted towards women veterans.  

So those things include mental disorders, cervical dysplasia, osteoporosis, ovarian cancer. I’m just picking out of the list here.  You will see obviously there are a number of conditions that can impact male veterans too obviously, STDs, even breast cancer, some things like this, osteoporosis, but these are conditions that we primarily either see or treat in women veterans.  

And you see some of this research coming out later in the presentation.  And I do think this is a term you are going to hear more frequently in the VA as we start to work more carefully on women’s health as we move forward.  

Some of the most interesting things about the women veterans, the population we have here in the VA, as you can see from this slide the number of women veterans in the VA has nearly has doubled over the past decade.  In the year 2000 we saw about 150,000 women veterans.  And in the most recent year of data here from 2009 we are seeing about close to 300,000 veterans.  And again this work is some of the work done by the Woman’s Health Evaluation Initiative led by Susan Frayne.  

One of the most interesting things that we are seeing in the VA is the age distribution of women veterans, especially if you compare the age distribution now compared to in 2000.  If you look at the graph of the age distribution in fiscal year 2006 compared to fiscal year 2009, you will see that we have three very distinct peaks of woman veterans.  

We have the first peak there which is about in the late twenties, year 29.  We have another major peak and that is about women veterans in the ages of probably forty-four, forty-five, forty-six.  And then if you look to the far right of your screen you will see another little blip of women in their early eighties.  What this means for us in the VA is that we really have to target our care, and our programs and our policies to women across the reproductive and gender-specific health spectrum.  

We have to pay attention to women in their late twenties and early thirties who may be coming to the VA looking for care for infertility treatment, or pregnancy treatment or contraception planning management.  Perhaps women in the mid forties are looking more towards of perhaps early, some menopausal issues.  And women in the eighties might be looking for care for some other types of chronic health conditions.  And so the research that you are going to see today and some of the things that we are really focused on is care across the spectrum of conditions.   

So when you think about gender-specific healthcare at the VA you can think about it in really a couple of major buckets.  We have the basic gender-specific services.  And those are the types of services that women come to the VA to receive that are common, maybe breast examination, cervical cancer screening, management of contraception, medications and menopause management.  

And then we have some more specialiazed gender-specific services such as obstetric care, gynecologic and breast cancers and infertility care.  And Laurie Zephyrin later on in the presentation is really going to be talking about some of the things that we do for some of these more specialized gender-specific services, pregnancy in particular.  

Before we go too deep into the research about some of these conditions specifically I wanted to talk about some of the important work Becky Yano, Bevanne Bean-Mayberry, and Donna Washington, and some other folks out in LA have done, really looking at the way that women’s healthcare is organized and delivered in the VA.  And this is really important to set the stage for reproductive and gender-specific care because it really gives you a sense of where women are going to get some of this gender-specific care they get.   

So what Becky and her colleagues have found is that there are basically three different structures of care that women veterans are receiving.  They can be receiving local primary care delivery arrangements.  That could be happening in a primary care clinic or by a designated women’s health provider.  Some of the service can be onsite at the VA as opposed to offsite by C basis or contract providers.  We’ll talk a little bit about that later.  

And Becky has also looked carefully into looking at the local authority over practice changes, so who determines staffing arrangements and things like that in women’s health clinics.   One of the interesting things that she has found is if you look, sorry, I’m trying to—can I minimize this?  It’s kind of in the way of some of the things I am trying to do.  

Moderator:  Oh yeah.  You can absolutely minimize the panel.  Just go to that upper left-hand arrow and click that.  

Kristen Mattocks:  Here?

Moderator:  Yeah.  

Kristen Mattocks:  Okay, but now it’s on the other side.  

Moderator:  Oh, you can once you minimize it to that little bar then you can grab it by the top and drag it anywhere out of your way.  

Kristen Mattocks:  All right, all right.  It’s still not, sorry.  

Moderator:  Do you see that big orange arrow at the top left?

Kristen Mattocks:  Yeah.  Oh there we go.  Okay, sorry about that, everyone.  All right, technology marches forward.  

So if you look at the local primary care delivery arrangements, what Becky and her group did is they compared some of these delivery arrangements between 2001 and 2007, really saw some pretty interesting results coming out of this.  So in terms of women receiving care in primary care arrangements between 2001 and 2007, the proportion of women who received care in that type of arrangement increased substantially.  In comparison, if you look at care received by just designated women’s health providers or a general primary care clinic without a designated healthcare provider those types of care seemed to decrease during the time period.  

One thing I wanted to, one thing, okay, one thing I wanted to point out here is that in the bar above in 2007 women’s primary care clinics, the interesting thing about that is only about forty-four percent of those clinics delivered gender-specific exams only.  And so as we go the next slide you will see that what is interesting in all this is that some of the treatment for some of these conditions and some of these services that women received in the VA we have seen declines of these between the survey years 2001 and 2007.  So with cervical cancer screening we see a decrease in that availability, same with screening mammograms, contraception services, nonsurgical breast cancer treatment as well as breast cancer surgery.  

Becky and her colleagues are looking at reasons why this could be.  And I know that Laurie’s group is starting to look this as well, but one of the interesting things we are seeing across all of these different, some of these different conditions is that we see a decline in some of these services.  

Now there could be possible reasons for this.  Becky’s survey really focused primarily on large VA medical centers.  And so it could be that women veterans are getting some of this care in CBOCs, which may or may not necessarily show up in this data.  And it could be that providers are referring more of these services to, or the VA providers are referring more of these services to C providers in the community.  And so it looks like we have decreases in these services even though women are still getting this care.  So with that as sort of a ground work so you understand how women are getting care, I wanted to move forward to a couple of specific areas of reproductive and gender-specific care in the VA for women veterans.

And I want to start with contraception because it seems like a good number of people are starting to work in this area.  This is work by Sonya Borrero and in her group.  And in most of these slides at the very bottom you see actually the paper that produced this data.  

And so what Sonya did is she examined the national VA administrative data and pharmacy benefit management database for 103,950 female veterans who made at least one primary care visit in 2008.  So what she wanted to see was whether there was any documentation of contraception coverage at any point during that fiscal year.  

And beyond that she wanted to take a closer look at what type of contraception women veterans were using.  And she classified it—her group classified it into three major categories according to clinical effectiveness.  

She classified it as most effective, moderately effective and least effective.  And you can see the three major areas there as well as how she classified those conditions.  

And some key variables she was looking at are both race ethnicity and receipt of care in a women’s health clinic versus just a primary care clinic.  She found some really pretty interesting results.  

First of all, the thing that she found was only about twenty-two percent of female veterans had a documented method of contraception in CPRS.  And there was little variation by race or ethnicity.  

In particular, in terms of the use of most effective methods as defined on the previous screen, 4.2 percent of women had an IUD or implant used and 3.7 percent of women had surgical sterilization.  When she fully adjusted the models it looked as though Hispanic and African American women were significantly less likely to have documented contraception method compared to white women.  

And furthermore, women who received care at women’s health clinics were significantly more likely to have a documented method of contraception than women who received care in primary care clinics.  And Sonya’s work is really fantastic because it really is some of the first work that has come out in the VA altogether in terms of women using contraception in the VA.    A group at Yale led by Julie Womack, Cindy Brandt, Matt Scotch I believe is at Arizona State, and Sylvia Leung, have started to look a little bit more carefully at how well contraceptive services are documented in CPRS.  So the goal in their study, and they are kind of just launching this now and have some preliminary results, is to really look into the VA progress notes to look to see how contraceptive information is identified there.  Their group beliefs with CPRS may not contain accurate contraceptive use information unless a review of progress notes may yield more accurate knowledge on the use of contraceptives among women veterans than reliance on CPRS alone.  

So Julie and Cindy are doing some great things with natural language processing to look at contraceptive use.  And so what they are doing is they have compared survey data from women veterans that come out of the women veterans’ cohort study in West Haven.  And the PIs of that study are Cindy Brandt and Sally Haskell.  

And they are comparing survey data with progress notes.  And so what they are finding is according to survey data forty-three percent of women veterans who have completed the baseline survey reported actively using contraception.  

In contrast, when you look at the VA progress notes for those women only thirteen percent of VA progress notes accurately identified contraceptive use.  And Julie and Cindy wanted to point out too that some contraceptive use was identified through chart review and not through patient reports, so obviously that there is a pretty significant disparity in terms of what women are reporting and what actually is in CPRS.  

Now there are a lot of reasons for that obviously.  It could be that women are receiving contraceptive care outside of the VA, so Julie and her group are continuing to look into that a little bit more.  

I wanted to move a little bit more in the direction of not just contraception, but unintended pregnancy as well among active duty service women and veterans.  And this is the work that has been done by Vinita Goyal, Sonya Borrero and Bimla Schwarz.

And as you see at the bottom here this is about to come out in print.  And so what Vinita, and Sonya and Bimla have done is they have compared active duty service women with seen held military veterans just to get a sense of what is known in terms of active duty service women compared to female military veterans.  

And as you can see on the left-hand column from existing literature we know—we are starting to know a good deal about active duty service women.  We have a general sense of some of their unintended pregnancy rates.  We have a general sense of their contraceptive use.  We are starting to learn a little bit more about emergency contraception, but in terms of female veterans a lot of this area is still unknown.  

We don’t know very much at all about unintended pregnancy rates.  I want to note that though it says here contraceptive use prevalence unknown, this paper basically came out at the same time as Sonya’s paper, so we do know a little bit about prevalence between Sonya’s paper and Julie’s study, but there is still a lot left unknown. There is a lot about emergency contraception we don’t know.  And I want to point out later in the presentation I have a slide from some researchers working in the military that you will see that some of this data is also being looked at as well.  

Next I want to move briefly into pregnancy.  There has been a couple of papers that have come out regarding pregnancy and some work that is starting to be done in pregnancy over the past couple of years.  

Our group at Yale did a study about two years ago now to look at the prevalence of coexisting conditions of pregnancy and mental health conditions among a group of OEF/OIF women.  We did an administrative cohort analysis of 43,078 OEF/OIF women veterans who had used VA care at least once between 2002 and 2008.  

We looked at both ICD-9 and CPT codes and we identified about 2,966 women who had an instance of pregnancy, which was about seven percent of women veterans and care during that cohort period.  And we also looked at ICD-9 codes to ascertain coexisting mental health diagnoses, including PTSD, depression, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder.

And what we found when we compared pregnant veterans with other female veterans is that it looks as though the pregnant veterans have higher rates of many of these mental health conditions, ranging from depression to PTSD, Bipolar Disorder.  If you look at the second bar above the bottom it looks about thirty-two percent of pregnant women that have had some type of mental health diagnosis and compared to twenty percent of all female veterans.  

And the far right-hand column gives the sense of how many of these women had been identified in the system with a mental health disorder before pregnancy.  And you will see that a good proportion of the women did have sustained mental health conditions.  

So one of the things that we found with this study is that it does seem that many women veterans who were trained for war in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from significant mental health problems.  However, it is not clear from our study if the mental health conditions were a direct result of combat exposure.   

Also because most pregnancy related care is provided outside the VA little is known regarding the pregnancy outcomes among women veterans once they leave the VA to get that care.  And I know that is something Laurie Zephyrin is going to talk about and it’s something that people are working to improve as well.  

And I wanted to move on from that slide into some work that’s currently being done because I think one of the problems with that study is that it became pretty difficult to correctly identify pregnant women veterans.   It could be that women came in and they had a positive pregnancy test, but it was difficult to know the outcomes of pregnancy.  

And so I wanted to point out that Jodie Katon, along with myself, and Becky Yano and some other people are now working on a project to identify pregnancy as resulting in among OEF/OIF women veterans, and determine the frequency of gestational diabetes and preeclampsia among these women veterans.  So Jodie is going to be looking at our same women veterans’ cohort study to determine this. And one of the things that she is going to very, look very closely at is really trying to identify pregnancy and delivery as clear as possible using her pre-specified combinations of CPT codes, ICD-9 codes and V codes.  It’s proven to be a bit more of a challenge than we had thought it would be, but we’re going to continue to work on that. 

And I also want to point out a study that was done, oh probably about six or seven years ago.  Lori Bastian, and Monique Chireau and some other folks at Duke did a study looking at outcomes, utilization and cost of pregnancy-related care, so this small pilot study of female veterans at one facility who received fee basis care for pregnancy. 

And Chireau and her colleagues found some very interesting things.  They basically identified thirty-three women veterans who had complete pregnancy data.  Among those women veterans ten percent of pregnant veterans had at least one chronic medication condition. Thirty-nine percent had at least psychiatric condition, which is very close to the proportion of women we found had a psychiatric condition. 

And adverse pregnancy outcomes were identified in thirty-six percent of those pregnant women veterans with the most common adverse advent being preterm delivery.  And after they adjusted for some co-variants they found that veterans with a psychiatric condition were significantly more likely to have an adverse pregnancy outcome. 

And so I think that there’s a lot of good work starting to be done in the area of pregnancy research.  And we hope to continue working on that as we move forward. 

I want to move now a little bit more generally into some gender-specific research we’ve done.  And again that’s looking at that broad list I presented in one of the earlier slides in terms of the broad list of gender-specific conditions that women receive treatment for at the VA. 

We in this study again using the women veterans’ cohorts study did an administrative cohort analysis of 64,000 women veterans in VA care, and used ICD-9 codes to identify gender-specific conditions and fee basis care and VA care for those conditions.  Overall, we found that thirty-six percent of all OEF women veterans received at least one gender-specific diagnosis during the cohort period. 

Twenty-four percent of these women veterans at least received at least some non-VA care for this condition.  And this non-VA care was really in this study limited to fee basis care. 

This next slide if you look at it carefully, on the far left-hand side you’ll see those major conditions I mentioned earlier, as well as the general prevalence of OEF/OIF women veterans who sought either VA care or fee basis care for those conditions.  So you’ll see starting at the top the highest prevalent condition was menstrual disorders followed by other female genital disorders, vaginitis, and cervical dysplasia.  And it goes all the way down to uterus cancer.  And again these are OEF/OIF women veterans who received care for this condition at any point between the years 2002 and 2008. 

If you continue to move right on your screen you’ll see the proportion of women who received only fee basis care for that condition.  So for menstrual disorders four percent of women veterans only received fee basis care for that condition. Five percent received both fee basis and VA care.  And on the far right ninety-one percent received only VA care for that condition, but not surprisingly the most common conditions, let’s menstrual disorders, vaginitis, women primarily received VA care for that condition.  When the condition got a little bit more specialized and the care may have not been able to be done in house, women received more fee basis care for those types of conditions. 

If we go to the next slide what you can see here is the general increase in the use of fee basis care for these gender-specific conditions during the study period.  So in the year 2000 about two percent of women veterans received fee basis care for a gender-specific condition, and by the year 2008 there was about seven percent of women who received at least some fee basis care for a gender-specific condition.  So it certainly increased during the study period. 

We took a closer look at some of the predictors of fee basis care for these gender-specific conditions.  If you look at the adjusted results there are some interesting findings by race.  Black women and women of unknown racial ethnic origin were less likely to receive fee basis care. Women with depression were somewhat more likely to receive fee basis care, and perhaps not surprisingly the more service connected disability women veterans had, the more likely they were to receive some fee basis care. 

One of the more interesting things that came out of this is again not surprisingly depending on the complexity of the facility women were more likely to receive care.  So at less complex VA facilities like level three facilities women were more likely to receive VA fee basis care than women at level one or level two VA facilities. 

I’m going to now just go through a little bit of qualitative work that we have done looking at women veterans’ experiences with and preferences for reproductive healthcare in the VA.  This is some work that Sonya Barrero and Sally Haskell, Cindy Brandt, and some other folks and I did.  And it was a study of women veterans who received care at two large VA facilities.

And we conducted focus groups with these women to get a sense of what needs were being met with current reproductive health services, what needs weren’t being met and sort of what the knowledge level was among women veterans in terms of respective health services.  There are five major themes that came out of this analysis. 

In general we found that women veterans preferred care at VA clinics over outside providers.  Women veterans had had both positive and negative reproductive health experiences at the VA. Knowledge gaps remain among women veterans in terms of what they knew and what they didn’t know about what services VA offered.  

In general women thought the VA should provide some additional coverage for some services, specifically infertility and newborn care.  And Laurie Zephyrin is going to talk about that in a little bit. 

But another interesting thing that came out of this study is that perceived gender discrimination among these women veterans is alive and well, and that generally women veterans felt very good about getting healthcare from their women’s health providers if they had them, but they did feel some discrimination once they left, as one women put it, the safety of VA women’s health clinics. 

I wanted to share some of these positive experiences women had.  One woman said, “I got my fibroid tumors removed here at the VA, which was the best surgery.  Now the VA is doing everything they can possibly do for me to conceive because I’m in my 40s and haven’t yet conceived.”  

On the other hand some other women veterans had concerns about some of the treatment they were getting from medical residents in particular.  This woman had a little bit of a funny quote.  “I had a problem with an intern giving me a pap smear.  I could tell he’d never done one before.  He was looking at the clampy things and he was kind of fumbling and just picked one up.  And he goes, ‘It, the size, doesn’t really matter, right?”  And she actually was—the woman was amused when she was telling the story as well. 

Women, as I mentioned earlier, were generally not aware of the range of reproductive health services available to them.  They—many women didn’t know that pregnancies are covered in the VA. 

And other women thought that reproductive healthcare was tied to service connected disability status.  So this woman for example said, “Does it depend on the percentage of disability you have?  So does ten percent cover you through pregnancy, but once you give birth your kid’s not covered?  Or if you’re one hundred percent, do they cover you and your child?”  So there was some confusion about that.  And again I know that Laurie and the folks in central office have done really a tremendous amount of work in the past couple of years to education women veterans on some of these issues. 

I’m going to go through a couple of other studies that focus more generally on gynecologic health.  The next couple of studies are from a grant that was Anne Sadler and her group in Iowa City, an HSR&D grant.  

And this particular study was sexual violence exposures in women veterans’ gynecologic health, a group of about 1,000 Midwestern veterans.  It was a computer-assisted telephone survey.  

And what Anne and her group found was that approximately half of women veterans had experienced completed sexual assault during their lifetime.  And about sixty-eight percent reported that sex was important in their lives and had engaged in sex with a partner during the past six months. 

A quarter of women veterans reported painful sexual, oops, sorry that skipped forward.  And generally what Anne found that women veterans had had problems with sexual functioning and much of this was associated with some of their lifetime history of sexual assault. 

Cate Bradley, who’s also at Iowa City and working with Anne Sadler, has done some really great work on urinary incontinence and mental health.  This is a recent study she has done.  She wanted to study associations between urinary incontinence symptoms, depression and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, again a secondary cross-sectional analysis of some of the data that was mentioned in the earlier slide. 

And she found that among women in the study thirty-nine percent had urinary incontinence symptoms at least a few times a month.  Twenty-one percent were very much or greatly bothered by it and seventeen percent had sought care for urinary incontinence symptoms. 

In the multivariable analysis it looks like prior sexual assault is associated with both stressed urinary incontinence as well as some urgency/mixed urinary incontinence types.  And PTSD was also associated with urgency and mixed urinary incontinence.  

Cate is also beginning to work on another study where she’s looking to define the prevalence and the natural history of symptoms and their associations with depression, PTSD, sexual trauma and other exposures.  And I know that Cate is just starting to work on this and it looks like they’re about seventy-five percent complete with enrollment, so and with these previous two studies I would definitely forward you to Cate and to Anne Sadler for more about that. 

I wanted to highlight some of the great work that’s being done in the active duty by leaders of the women, Military Women’s Health Research Interest Group of the TriService Nursing Research Program.  And you’ll see here on the left-hand side there’s four major investigators.  

And if you look at the breadth of their work from postpartum depression, to menstrual suppression, and iron deficiency and some of these things that they’ve done, they’ve just done a tremendous amount of work.  Their citations are here.  Their email addresses are here on the left-hand side.  

And I also want to point out that they also have a Facebook page, which I did just join and I’m getting some great updates from the group.  So I would definitely urge all of you to join as well.  They’re doing some really great work there.  

I’m just going to talk very briefly.  Much of this work that I highlighted today comes out of our Women Veterans Cohort Study.  And I just want to mention it briefly. 

As I said earlier, Cindy Brandt and Sally Haskell at VA Connecticut are the principal investigators of that study.  The broad aim of the study was to examine healthcare outcomes, costs and utilization among OEF/OIF female veterans.

It is a wonderful data source for any or all of you on this call to use if you have specific reproductive or gender-specific questions.  The nice thing about it is at present the cohort includes 88,000 women, which should be power enough to almost answer any research question.  We also have a prospective cohort survey which includes 415 women.  And there’s thirty-nine pages of survey that we’ve asked these women over a three-year period.  So there’s an enormous amount of data there.  And we’d be happy to work with investigators on the call to answer some of your specific questions. 

Here’s some general characteristics of that OEF/OIF dataset.  It’s since been updated since this slide.  

But with that I wanted to turn it over to Laurie Zephyrin because as the director of reproductive health she has done so much I think in terms of policies and programs for women veterans here at the VA.  And I want to give her plenty of time to talk.  So go ahead, Laurie.  

Laurie Zephyrin:  Hi.  Hello.  This is Laurie Zephyrin.  Can you hear me?  

Kristen Mattocks:  Yep.  

Laurie Zephyrin:  Great, excellent.  Thank you, Kristin, if we can go to the next slide please?  And Kristin gave a nice overview of some of the reproductive health research that has been going on in the VA.  And we’re seeing more and more interest and more and more and more studies.

What I wanted to do was just talk about women’s healthcare a lot, reproductive healthcare across the lifespan.  Before I do that just for those that don’t know, I work for Women Veterans Health Strategic Healthcare Group.  The chief consultant of that is Dr. Patricia Hayes.  

And there are three directors under that group.  There’s a director for comprehensive health, which is Dr. Sally Haskell.  And I’m the director for reproductive health actually.  And also there’s a director women’s health education, which is Dr. Laure Veet.  

And so there’s a lot of work going on in women’s health that are divided within those groups.  We also have a deputy director for comprehensive health, which is Dr. Stacy Garrett-Ray, and our new deputy director for reproductive health, which is Dr. Karen Feibus, and our deputy director for women’s health education, which is Mr. Barbara Polak.

So I wanted to talk about women’s reproductive health.  And as Kristin’s initial slide, when we think about reproductive health we think about reproductive health across the lifespan.  And so there are younger women’s concerns as gynecology care, maternity care, preconception care, issues relating to military sexual trauma and other issues such as the need for flexible appointments, the need for childcare and elder care so that women can come to their appointments, and also the interaction of reproductive health with acute and chronic illnesses.  So go to the next slide please. 

There are also middle-aged women’s concerns where preventative care also becomes an issue, menopausal, perimenopausal needs start to surface. Gynecology care is also very important, urogynecological care, also acute and chronic illness and mental health.  And as you will see with all of these conditions they can vary.  They vary across the lifespan as well. 

And there are also older women’s concerns such as geriatric care, gynecology care, urogynecology care, pain management, inpatient and extended care, grief counseling as well as interaction with reproductive health and acute and chronic illness.  

We just put this slide to just think about in terms of our younger population of women veterans who tend to be OEF/OIF/OND veterans.  This is a list of the top ten diagnoses.  And we see that the genitourinary system is within the top ten diagnoses.  So it is something that we see very regularly.  I’m also an obstetrician/gynecologist and in my gynecology practice in the VA I see a lot of young women that come in for these specific issues.  

In terms of reproductive health issues across the lifespan, can you go back one slide please?

Moderator:  Oh, yes, sorry.  

Laurie Zephyrin:  Okay, oh yeah, forward one slide.  Marie, thank you, next slide.  So in terms of thinking from a policy perspective, the research that’s done by the researchers in this field is very helpful to inform what types of policy we need to think about and what types of programs we need to develop to ensure that our women veterans are receiving quality reproductive healthcare. 

In terms of reproductive health in the VA this position has been around for about a year and a half, two years.  And so we’re fairly new in the VA and really one of the priorities that we thought about is really understanding reproductive health needs of women veterans.  

And Kristin presented some wonderful research which informs us and allows us to get a better sense of what are the reproductive healthcare needs across the VA.  Other things we need to think about in terms of understanding reproductive health, understanding how care is delivered, understanding the availability of reproductive technologies, understanding the specialty services that are provided to women, so for example your gynecologic care access, gynecologic cancer care access, also getting a sense of the surgical services and also the counseling needs like preconception counseling, contraceptive needs for example.  

It’s important for us to also describe the system and patient characteristics for care provided in the VA and also for fee basis care.  And Kristin has presented some of that research as well, knowing GYN provider distribution and capacity. 

So for those researchers that are interested in reproductive health these are very ripe areas to think about exploring, developing care coordination tools, back one slide please,—

Moderator:  I’m sorry. 

Laurie Zephyrin:  —developing coordination tools for maternity care management and tracking.  All those will inform the research agenda for reproductive health so that we can understand the healthcare needs for military women, women’s veterans across the lifespan. Next slide please?

I wanted to talk a little bit about maternity care.  Our system is very unique in that there are a lot of transitions that occur within our system for maternity care.  And so if we look at the first portion, first sort of in box in the slide we see preconception care and safe prescribing. 

And so before a women gets pregnant we need to be able to ensure that someone is counseling her, asking her about her pregnancy intentions, asking her about whether she wants to be on contraception, looking at the list of medications that she may be on and determining depending on her pregnancy intentions the safety of those medications, and so thinking about that in the context of potential co-morbid conditions. 

And then is the women transitions into pregnancy, and in terms of that transition in the U.S. populations about half of pregnancies are unintended.  And so that’s why it’s really critical when seeing a woman of childbearing age to talk about the preconception care issues and safe prescribing issues. 

And so in the transition to pregnancy for within the VA the VA will pay for eligible women to receive their maternity care.  And so for the most part a lot of that care may be provided in a non-VA setting and certainly the delivery will occur in a non-VA setting.  

And so looking at these transitions from a research perspective will also inform the work that we do from a policy and programmatic perspective.  And then also that transition, so the arrows represent transitions, the transition that into the VA in the postpartum state, and so how to ensure that we understand the outcomes, we understand what went on during pregnancy, and making sure that she comes back to the VA for care as well as if she hasn’t been to the VA during her pregnancy.  Next slide please?

And to really inform and educate women and providers in terms of pregnancy our office has put forth some pregnancy campaigns.  So for example this slide shows one of the outreach campaigns on a healthy pregnancy makes a great first gift, and talk to your VA provider if you are pregnant or hope to be pregnant.

And so this is really to have women veterans think about preconception care and thinking about their health before they become pregnant.  Next slide please?

We also have developed a maternity care coordination handbook, which should be officially released sometime in the next month or so.  We’ve collaborated with all the key offices and within the VA to develop this.  And this will address the coordination and follow up of pregnancy care and the streamlining of maternity care fee basis referrals. 

And as I showed you in the slides that previously in terms of the transitions the goal is to really move, make those transitions very smooth for the women.  In terms of newborn care coverage many of you may know the enactment of the caregivers and veteran omnibus health services after 2010.  It’s authorized VA to provide certain healthcare services to a newborn child.  And so as of May 2010 for women who receive maternity care covered through the VA they also receive coverage for their newborn care up to seven days.  And in terms of maternity care resources we’ve collaborated with the fee basis office to develop processes to assist in standardizing the referral process for maternity care.  We helped develop a maternity care reference sheet.  

We also worked—the VA-DoD pregnancy work group and helped disseminate, or disseminated the VA-DoD pregnancy guidelines.  And also we have tools for patients, something called the Purple Book, if we go to the next slide.

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And essentially it’s a VA-DoD it’s a pregnancy guide developed by the VA-DoD working group.  And this is really a wonderful book for patients who are pregnant, which essentially guides them through their pregnancy.  And so your women veteran program manager at each of your facilities for those who are commissioned can definitely get access to that.  We have ordered—we have almost 20,000 ordered on our TMS system.  You can even order them yourselves for free so that you can provide them to your patients so that they have this guide that can help them get through their pregnancy.  Next slide please?

And another area that we’ve been working on is in emergency contraception.  And we developed a policy document essentially on emergency contraception rights of conscience.  And the goal of this policy which also will be released within the next month is to provide guidance to the field in terms of how to ensure that women veterans have timely access to emergency contraception. 

We’ve also worked with pharmacies to develop guidance on advanced provision of emergency contraception and also really defining what emergency contraception is so that people are, so that providers are clear what is emergency contraception and when it can be used.  Next slide please?

We also have within our women’s health transformation initiative to the sub-initiative new models of care.  There are several sub-initiatives in improved care coordination that focus on women’s health, reproductive health. 

One is we’ve been working with the VA emergency services, national and international director of emergency department to look at the care provided to women within emergency departments.  We developed an assessment tool.  We put together a task force to assess delivery of reproductive health services in VA emergency departments.  

And there’s also another group that is focusing on provider education and working with the national simulation center to also provide education to emergency department providers through simulation on reproductive healthcare issues. Also in terms of safe prescribing in women of childbearing ages is a huge priority for our office and we’ve collaborated with pharmacy benefits management and with IT to implement a system decision support to increase provider and staff awareness of teratogenic risk.  

There’s also a breast cancer tracking tool that’s being developed as well as a breast cancer clinical case registry which is to essentially allow us to be able to track within, provide a method within CPRS to track abnormal test results.  And this is one of our transformation initiatives as well within women’s health.  

And just to conclude, when I think about reproductive health if you think about the things that we need to know from a research perspective, and some of the audience are researchers, we need to continue to understand what are the access to care issues, what are the quality of care issues, what are the policies that we can develop to ensure that we’re providing, continue to ensure that we’re providing the best care.  And also the research piece is a big piece. 

And when we think about reproductive health there are many different categories. There’s the surgical piece.  There’s the preventative health and wellness piece.  There’s the specialty services piece which can include maternity and urogynecology care.  And then there’s thinking about it from an integration practice in terms of how do we integrate reproductive healthcare within the broader context of women’s healthcare, and integrate that into the broader context of just looking at the woman as an entire person and what are potential other conditions that her reproductive health may also interact with that we need to think about.  

If we go to the next slide this is just another one of our pamphlets that we provide to women veterans so that they can understand the types of services that are available.  And it’s very important that piece in terms of really letting women veterans know that they can come to the VA for reproductive healthcare.  And it’s a particular site.  I have access to a particular level of care and the VA would be able to allow them to have that care at another site or fee base that care as well. 

So I want to just thank you.  And I’ll turn it back to Kristin.  

Kristen Mattocks:  Yeah.  And I know we’re coming to the end of our time.  I just want to at the very end here just mention the reproductive health working group that Laurie and I co-facilitate.  It’s been a lovely group of researchers from across the country.  And we work together on papers and on grants, feedback on data analysis plans.  

I think we’re probably going to start to have a bit more of a clinical focus.  I think at times on the call there’s a lot of mentorship opportunities.  And if you’re interested in participating send me an email.  At present it meets the third Monday of each month, but because we’re getting more folks from the West Coast and Hawaii we’re going to change that time so they don’t have to get up at three o’clock in the morning and join our call. 

And finally this is just a list of folks that were mentioned in the call.  And so if you have specific questions about some of the methods or the study I would direct you to these folks.  And that’s it.  

Moderator:  Great.  Thank you very much, Kristin and Laurie.  We do have quite a few questions that have come in, so we’ll see how many we can get to.  For those of you that joined us after the top of the hour if you’d like to submit a question or a comment just please type it into the question section which is located on the right-hand side of your screen in the go to webinar panel.  

So the first question that came in, this is asking for a clarification.  Is the increased rate of adverse pregnancies in OEF/OIF women veterans more prevalent amongst those with medical conditions and mental health diagnoses due to medications or due to lack of prenatal care?

Kristen Mattocks:  We have no idea.  I wouldn’t even say, and Laurie can speak to this, I wouldn’t even say that we’ve necessarily seen an increase in adverse—we haven’t looked at that.  We’ve looked at mental health conditions among pregnant women, but we haven’t looked at the increase of adverse conditions.  And we certainly haven’t done any studies that point to one factor or the other.  Laurie, I don’t know if, Laurie, you want to add anything on that?

Laurie Zephyrin:  Yeah.  I would just say those studies looked at the presence of a co-morbid condition in someone that’s pregnant.  And so the big question is that’s definitely an area that’s ripe for research.  We don’t have the answers to whether our women veterans have different pregnancy outcomes than the general population.  We just don’t know.  And so that is a great area for research to answer that particular question.  

Moderator:  Great.  Thank you both for your responses.  The next question is how can such a high percentage of OEF/OIF women get VA only for pregnancy?  That must not include delivery?

Kristen Mattocks:  Yeah.  So the thing with that study is that all we looked at is if they had a mention in any of their charts of an ICD-9 of CPT code.  It doesn’t mean that they got pregnancy care.  It could be that they went into their physician for a head cold, or I always use the example of toe fungus.  And the clinician noted that they were pregnant.  But it doesn’t—that study does not mean that they got pregnancy care in the VA.  It simply means that the VA noted in the charts that they were pregnant.  

Moderator:  Okay.  Thank you for that answer.  The next question, are there any gender-specific presumptive illnesses associated with reproductive health for OEF/OIF/OND women veterans?

Kristen Mattocks:  I’ll let Laurie take that. 

Laurie Zephyrin:  Are there any gender-specific?  I’m sorry.  Can you repeat the question, presumptive illnesses?

Moderator:  Yeah.  Are there any gender-specific presumptive illnesses associated with reproductive health for OEF/OIF/OND women veterans?

Laurie Zephyrin:  So we’re hopefully under I can understand the question.  So if we look at the military and with the active duty population there are some studies that show that women when they’re deployed have higher rates of urinary tract infections because of the conditions and may have potential menstrual irregularities and challenges with maintaining use of various types of contraception.  

In terms of in the veteran population whether they have higher diagnoses of specific reproductive health illnesses, again that’s an area that we should continue to research and need to understand how their service from a reproductive health perspective what are the outcomes that may be higher in our women veterans compared to non women veterans.  So again this—the research that Kristin presented today is really just an overview of what’s available.  And the supply that she showed on the contraception which looked at what was available in active duty women on contraception and what was available in women veterans on contraception, there’s definitely a significant opportunity to do this research so that we can get more information about reproductive health in our women veterans. 

Moderator:  Thank you for that response.  I do notice that we are past the top of the hour.  If you two are available I’m happy to continue reading the questions if you can stay on for a few more minutes.  If not I can send them to you offline and get written responses.  Do you have a preference?

Kristen Mattocks:  I can stay.  I’m not sure of Laurie’s schedule.  

Laurie Zephyrin:  Yeah.  I unfortunately have to get off the call, but if you wanted to stick on, Kristin, and then if there are questions that are emails then we can also answer those later on.  

Kristen Mattocks:  Yeah.  That sounds good. 

Moderator:  Great.  Thank you so much for taking the time to join us, Laurie.  

Laurie Zephyrin:  Thank you.  Thanks, everyone, for listening.  

Moderator:  Okay.  The next question we have, are there are any plans in the future for veterans to receive OB/GYN services from VA hospitals?

Kristen Mattocks:  That would be a great question for Laurie and I’ll direct that question there.  I do know, and actually there’s been and if this person who is asking the question wants to email me I can dig it up and find it.  

There was actually an article that came out last week, I believe it was in the Salt Lake City newspaper, about focusing on female veterans and how some VAs across the country do provide and are starting to provide obstetrical care.  It’s a very, very small number, but if the person writing that question wants to email me I can send that article.  And that’s also a good question for Laurie, who has a better sense of general policy on that area. 

Moderator:  Thank you.  The next question, are there any new guidelines coming out that will make it clear what infertility treatments the VA will provide?

Kristen Mattocks:  That’s a good question.  The VA, and I’ll direct this to Laurie more specifically, the VA does not provide in vitro fertilization specifically.  The VA does not do that.  

Many of the sort of lower level infertility treatments the VA does provide, but it definitely does not provide in vitro fertilization.  Laurie might have a specific list of what is and what’s not provided.  I believe intrauterine insemination is probably covered.  Some of the medications needed to take to enhance or to regulate ovulation, I believe that those are covered, but in vitro is not. 

Moderator:  Thank you for that answer.  The next question, I realize this may be a very broad question, but what do you see as being the greatest current needs to improve mental healthcare for pregnant women?

Kristen Mattocks:  That’s a good question.  Well I think, as Laurie mentioned, she and some of the other folks in the central office are starting to do some great things and great programs to improve coordination I think, which is really important between VA and off VA providers.  So it could be that one of the things that’s happening is that a woman is getting VA care for mental health and is getting fee basis care for pregnancy.  And it might be great if those two providers were talking about how best to treat the pregnant woman, both from a pregnancy perspective and a mental health perspective.  

So Laurie and her group are really working to target those types of issues in terms of improving care coordination.  I also think another thing, and we’ve really not moved too far into this area yet, but I think another important thing is educating community-based providers about some of these issues that women veterans might be experiencing.  

We don’t know if community providers are aware of a woman’s history of military sexual trauma or of PTSD.  From just some very small evidence we have we know that some of these that women aren’t routinely screened for PTSD for example in the community obstetrics setting.  

So I think it’s on both ends.  I think it’s improving the coordination and I think it’s educating providers in the community.  And hopefully these two things together will help to improve some of the mental health issues women may be experiencing. 

Moderator:  Thank you for that answer.  We also have quite a few comments that have come in.  Here’s one.  This is not a question.  It’s more of an observation.  I was at a homeless transitional housing recently for women veterans and there are still many misconceptions about reproductive health coverage since frontline providers are sharing this information.  One homeless woman veteran said she was told to go elsewhere for maternity care and delivery last year.  This led her to believe she was not covered for anything. 

Kristen Mattocks:  Right, yes, absolutely.  And that’s definitely one thing that came out of our focus group.  And but let me also say that those focus groups were done in let’s say 2009/2010.  And as Laurie implied, we took the findings from that focus group and sent it to Laurie and some of her colleagues in central office.  

And but I think that that’s really one of the things Laurie is out there aiming to improve is getting out an awareness of exactly what services are covered so providers know, so patients know, so there’s not just this general misunderstanding about what is and what’s not covered in terms of reproductive health.  Hopefully we’ll get there.  I think we’ve made great progress so far.  

Moderator:  Great, a few more questions to get through.  Will the maternity care coordination handbook address mental health issues as well?

Kristen Mattocks:  Good question.  I’d send that one to Laurie.  

Moderator:  All right.  Thank you.  

Kristen Mattocks:  Yeah. 

Moderator:  Next question.  How do you order the educational material on the pregnancy and childbirth guide?  

Kristen Mattocks:  Another good question for Laurie, although I think that didn’t she say that—I believe she said you could order some of this stuff on TMS, but I would ask her that as well.  

Moderator:  Thank you.  We have another comment that came in.  Best Web presentation I’ve attended, not only in terms of content, but beautiful use of Web tools and technology.  You’ve set the bar incredibly high.  Thank you. 

Kristen Mattocks:  Oh nice.  Thank you.  

Moderator:  The next question, were transgender issues dealt with at all during your research?

Kristen Mattocks:  Ah.  That’s a great question.  Interestingly to date, no, but I’m actually starting work.  I’ve started to look at some of our survey findings on how lesbians and bisexual women, differences in health outcomes and service utilization in the VA.  And I’ve just literally finished putting together kind of a rough abstract overview of what that data looks like. 

So whoever that questioner is they can email me directly and I’ll let you know.  It’s very preliminary, but I’m hoping that that’s a paper I can finish off in the next couple months, but I’d be delighted to talk in more detail to whoever the questioner is.  

Moderator:  Great.  Thank you.  The next question, what is the Women’s Health Strategic Healthcare Group doing to raise awareness about preconception issues among male VA patients?

Kristen Mattocks:  Hm.  That’s a good question.  I would refer that to Laurie Zephyrin or to Sally Haskell, Patty Hayes.  I know that there is quite a big effort in their group in addressing that issue.  I’m not aware exactly of how it is differentially targeted to male veterans, but I’m sure they’ve thought of it.  So I would send that on to Laurie as well, but it definitely is a big initiative in their office.  I know that. 

Moderator:  Thank you.  The next question, I’m not so sure what RH stands for, but may you’d know, oh, reproductive health.  For the reproductive health taskforces are there taskforces per site or one overall large taskforce?

Kristen Mattocks:  Well the reproductive health working group I mentioned is an overall national group.  I guess I’m not completely clear if the person is talking about a task force that’s different in the working group, but the working group I mentioned is national.  I’m not aware of a lot of necessarily facility level taskforces, but I could be wrong on that.  

Moderator:  Thank you.  Just a couple more questions to go if you’re still available.  All right, okay, given that there seems to be an information gap on women patients knowing about the reproductive services that the VA offers, is there literature or websites that can be shared with women patients concerning this?  The speakers mentioned the Purple Book, but I was wondering if there were other options as well. 

Kristen Mattocks:  I don’t know.  My sense is that the Purple Book is the strategic healthcare group’s sort of major effort at this point to get that out there for starters.  You can ask Laurie about that, but I know that the Purple Book was just an enormous amount of work and they’re hoping that as that begins to get more integrated into the clinical setting it will answer many of the questions, but I would direct that to Laurie to see if there’s any additional information out there.  

Moderator:  Thank you.  Next question, are you aware of any VA facilities that have a fee basis process where perinatal, postnatal, I’m sorry, prenatal, postnatal medical info is received for continuity of care purposes?

Kristen Mattocks:  Oh, good question.  Yes, actually.  I have to give some kudos to our facility here.  Our women veterans program manager here in North Hampton is one talking about and of one, but her name is Kim Adams, and has worked carefully with some folks in our quality management department as well as the director of women’s healthcare, but she as a matter of fact has put together a great, for lack of a better term, sort of pregnancy database.  

And she works very closely with our fee basis managers here.  And she works carefully with private obstetricians in the community.  She is sure to get sort of the results of the pregnancy.  She knows whether it was a successful pregnancy or if the woman had a problem with the pregnancy.  

I know that she tries to follow the women to get them back into VA care after their pregnancy, which is another big issue I didn’t mention that we’re starting to do, to see, but I think Kim as our women veteran’s program manager has done a tremendous job on that front.  So I know at our facility she’s working on that.  

I can’t speak to other facilities, but my guess is that it’s almost a facility by facility basis.  I’d be happy to connect whoever the person that asked the question is with Kim directly so she can share sort of an overview of what that database looks like, but she’s done a great job in terms of tracking these women for our facility.  

Moderator:  Thank you.  We are nearing the end of this.  We do have it looks a comment that came in.  Eight physical therapists nationwide within VA community are completing a five-year demonstration project this summer on pelvic floor dysfunction.  All eight of these clinicians have set up and are running pelvic floor dysfunction clinics for women within their VA. 

Kristen Mattocks:  Great.  

Moderator:  I would think that publishing findings related to these new PFD clinics would be worthwhile.  

Kristen Mattocks:  Yeah.  And I would again encourage that person to send that information our way too.  The next thing we’re thinking of doing is putting together a general overview paper on reproductive health in the VA and some of the research that’s out there and some of the policy that we’ve been doing.  

And I would encourage that person to pass along either the methods or the findings to us.  I’d like to include that if they don’t mind in this final paper.  That’s great, great news.  

Moderator:  Thank you for that response, all right, down to the last two.  Is there a listserv one can join, meaning the taskforce?

Kristen Mattocks:  Yes.  I would, oh, so send me an email and I will put you on our email distribution group for the reproductive health working group.  

Moderator:  Thank you for that.  And the very last question that we have, what resources and/or groups are located in the Southeast region, for instance Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama?

Kristen Mattocks:  Oh, good question.  At this point I’m not as aware of regional resources, but let’s think about that for a minute.  Again I would have that person write to me.  I can connect with them with some people down there that might be doing some of the work.  Or they can connect with us nationally.  I’ll have to think about that a little bit.  

Moderator:  Okay.  Thank you.  And I really do appreciate you giving out your contact information so that these people can follow up with you.  That’s very generous to offer up your time.  

And we have reached the end of the questions.  Do you have any concluding comments you would like to make?

Kristen Mattocks:  No.  I just want to thank everyone who is left on the line, but thanks, folks, for participating.  It was great.  This is definitely a work in progress and as I said we tried to include as many things as I’m aware of, but as more things are out there I would really love to work with more people to really tackle this issue nationally.  So thanks for coming, for participating.  

Moderator:  Thank you for taking the time to present to us.  We got a lot of positive feedback for this session.  And this does conclude today’s presentation.  You can join....

**[End of Recording]**

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