For many years now, the primary role of the Department of Veterans Affairs has been to ensure that the treatment services for veterans are paid for. So we now have a lot of data about all the services for a whole generation that were paid for. By and large, veterans have treatment in the broader health system, so they would see a psychiatrist, a psychologist, or a specialist of some kind, depending on what their condition is, and they'll use their DVA-issued gold or white card to pay for that service. We get the data about the services they have had.
There has been far less visibility of the exact treatment that someone is having and good data about its efficacy. We're still working on how we can better monitor health outcomes. It's very easy for us to monitor the amount of service. We have a lot of metrics about how many services people have had, what kind of treatment practitioners they are seeing, data about their hospital admissions, including how long an admission was and what it was for, but it is really challenging to get good data about their health outcomes.
Even if you see a general practitioner, you might raise five issues with the practitioner in the course of a consultation. We can tell what prescriptions someone might have come out with, because we get the payment data for those prescriptions when they are presented at a pharmacy, but we don't know exactly what transpired in the course of the consultation. We know if you are seeing a psychologist, but we don't know what therapy they may have been using.
There are some exceptions to that. For example, the Veterans and Veterans Families Counselling Service has a much more complete set of data about courses of treatment. They require their therapist to use evidence-based forms of treatment for particular conditions, so they have a much richer source of data about the health outcomes of their clients.