Whole Health in the Whole System of the Veterans Administration: How Will We Know We Have Reached This Future State?

Abstract

In the early years of whole systems research in integrative health, who imagined 15 years down the road that we would be looking at an effort to transform the whole system of the Veterans Administration (VA) with two longtime integrative health leaders piloting the initiative? This special issue is to separately publish ''What Should Healthcare Systems Consider When Implementing Complementary and Integrative Health: Lessons from Veterans Health Administration.'' We invited this commentary as a companion piece on the context of the VA's ''whole health'' model in which that work is imbedded. Specifically, research is needed to show that in fact the system had reached what the authors call this ''future state.'' Lead author