Certainly.
Within the United States, we as well are increasing the technical capability to have that type of access throughout the rural areas. Other departments are working on that as well. The Department of Agriculture and a couple of others have just put out some major grants to be able to extend broadband to areas that don't currently have it. It's also true that being able to reach the rural communities is very much a cooperative event. The VA can't do it alone. We need to rely on our partnerships that already exist in those communities.
When we do schedule the future meeting for mental health, you may also be interested in inviting to attend a new office that has just been started, called the Office of Rural Health. This office was created just in this last year to address many of the issues that you were talking about. They can talk broadly to not just the technology but also some of the other clinical issues.
As an example, it is true that when we work with rural areas, we need to have a different way of reaching out. Ms. Graham and her team, as well as the team that works on the personal health record and My HealtheVet, realize that.... I talked about in-person authentication as the precursor to being able to import the information from your electronic health record. They are looking at ways in which we could possibly write policy to be able to have visiting nurses or someone else who's present in the community do that in-person authentication when the veteran is in the rural community, versus our precursor at this point in time, which is bringing them into the local VA medical centre.
It is true that when you reach out to the rural community, you need to be able to adjust and be a bit more creative than you do in urban centres. My recommendation would be to have the Office of Rural Health participate in a future presentation.