VA Eastern Kansas Health Care System (VAEKHCS)

VAEKHCS has been serving Veterans since 1886. In 1998, the Dwight D. Eisenhower VA Medical Center in Leavenworth, Kansas, and the Colmery-O'Neil VA Medical Center in Topeka, Kansas were integrated to form the VA Eastern Kansas Health Care System (VAEKHCS). VAEKHCS’ primary service area consists of 39 counties in Kansas and Missouri covering about 20,000 square miles of the country. The total Veteran population in these counties is over 110,000, with over 47,000 enrolled in our VA healthcare system. The number of Veterans who present each year to receive care is approximately 35,000 (which is over 70% of those enrolled).
The Veterans' Health Care Reform Act of 1996 moved the VA from a large inpatient complex serving only service-connected injuries to a more flexible outpatient facility that provides excellent healthcare as part of a benefits package that emphasizes preventive and primary care. VAEKHCS has a unique array of services including acute medicine and ICU beds; two Community Living Centers (accommodating longer-term stays for older Veterans, those requiring intensive physical rehabilitation, etc.); a domiciliary for Veterans struggling with issues related to mental health, substance use disorder, and homelessness; an acute psychiatry unit; two specialty mental health units including a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders residential program; and a dementia care unit. Across its facilities, VAEKHCS completes approximately 400,000 outpatient visits per year. VAEKHCS has also established eight Community-Based Outpatient Health Clinics which bring healthcare closer to Veterans. There are approximately 1,900 employees across the facilities of VAEKHCS serving an increasingly growing population of Veterans in our area.

Research Service

Research service at VAEKHCS has a long history dating back to the very beginnings of VA research and involving collaborations with the Menninger Institute. More recently, Dr. Mary E. Oehlert began rebuilding the research program at VAEKHCS in 2010 in her capacity then as the Associate Chief of Staff for Research. (Dr. Oehlert now serves as the Treasurer on the MVBRF Board of Directors.) The Office of Research and Development Strategic Plan served as a blueprint for re-organization. Given the small size of the program,two areas were identified for development: VA Cooperative Studies Programs to include the “Million Veteran Program” (MVP), a multi-site research program designed to build one of the world's largest medical genomic databases by partnering with Veteran volunteers, and retrospective health data research using the VA’s Corporate Data Warehouse. Dr. Oehlert successfully competed to become an MVP local site. Then, in 2018, Drs. Oehlert and Gaddy expanded the involvement of VAEKHCS in genomics biobanking research efforts by competing to become a site for the NIH-funded All of Us (AoU) research program as well. VAEKHCS currently serves as the only active VA recruitment site in the state of Kansas for MVP and the longest-standing enrolling VA site forAoU. To date, VAEKHCS has enrolled over 15,000 Veterans in MVP and enrolled over 700 Veterans in AoU, demonstrating VAEKHCS’s ability to recruit for large-scale research studies. Since Dr. Melinda A. Gaddy assumed the role of the VAEKHCS Associate Chief of Staff for Researchin 2019, increased involvement in clinical trials has represented a primary goal for continued growth of the Research Program. Dr. Gaddy is focusing particularly on grown in VA, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Defense-funded research opportunities, with two such clinical trials pending launch at VAEKHCS, and two grant applications underway in collaboration with the University of Kansas.

Affiliates

The main academic affiliate for VAEKHCS is the University of Kansas (KU). VAEKHCS has current collaborations with the Department of Internal Medicine at the KU Medical Center as well as KU’s School of Pharmacy, School of Business, Department of Psychology, and Department of Educational Psychology.