VA spent more than $3 billion on PTSD treatments in 2012

Institute of Medicine: DOD, VA Fail at Tracking Outcomes of PTSD Treatments
US Medicine
By Annette M. Boyle
August 2014

WASHINGTON – One of the signature injuries of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), affected 13.5% of soldiers and caused 502,000 veterans to seek treatment in 2012.

Despite the ubiquity of the disorder, DOD and VA employ no consistent measures to determine the effectiveness of the treatments received by millions of servicemembers and veterans, according to the Institute of Medicine (IoM).

As a result, neither the DOD nor the VA can determine which treatments work best or whether some treatments work at all.

Yet, in 2012, DOD spent $294 million and the VA spent more than $3 billion on PTSD treatments.

“Given that the DOD and VA are responsible for serving millions of servicemembers, families, and veterans, we found it surprising that no PTSD outcome measures are used consistently to know if these treatments are working or not,” said IoM committee chair Sandro Galea, professor and chair of the department of epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York.

“They could be highly effective, but we won’t know unless outcomes are tracked and evaluated.”

The current IoM report, “Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Military and Veteran Populations: Final Assessment,” is the second in a two-phase study authorized by Congress in 2010 to look at the effectiveness of PTSD programs and services offered by the DOD and VA.
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