By JIM BARON

PROVIDENCE — Veterans hospitals are in a unique position to pioneer treatments in brain injury and mental health, U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy said Friday as he and Sen. Jack Reed joined Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki at the Providence VA Medical Center.

The visit comes as the Chalkstone Avenue hospital is physically expanding in several directions, adding new facilities and departments funded in part with $11 million in federal stimulus money for renovations and modernization projects.
“It’s going to enable us to build a new emergency room, a new operating room, a new intensive care unit, and a two-story mental health addition to the main building,” said James Burrows, director of communications for the hospital. “Out back we have a $9 million research building going up, it’s going to be research related to what is happening to the things that are being done for returning combat veterans now, so there is a lot prosthetics, cellular research.”
Burrows said they are experimenting with a sensor that is implanted in a person’s brain that will allow him or her to move a mouse on a computer screen. “I’ve seen it demonstrated; it’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.”
Shinseki said that in the short period of time since he was picked by President Barack Obama to head the veterans’ affairs department, “I can say confidently that VA health care system is the largest in this country and there is good reason to believe it is also the best.”
As patients and staff crowded the corridor to watch a brief news conference with the secretary and the two lawmakers, Shinseki told reporters, “At a time when we are all thinking about how to get more access to health care, at a better cost and higher quality, at the nexus of those three issues, we at the VA find good answers for what we do and also what it might mean for others who are looking at health care reform.”
“I am pleased that Secretary Shinseki is coming to Providence as part of a thorough, nationwide review of the VA’s operations as he seeks to transform the agency to meet the needs of our veterans in the 21st century. The Providence VA Medical Center and its staff do an outstanding job of providing our veterans with quality, affordable health care,” said Reed, a member of Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and who, like Secretary Shinseki, is a West Point graduate. 
Kennedy called Shinseki, “Somebody who has an impressive biography and history of service to our country,” and said his perspective as a long-time soldier who ended his military career as a general and U.S. Army Chief of Staff “will be of tremendous service to our veterans.”
The congressman noted that Shinseki also lends the experience of having spent a great deal of time as a patient in VA hospitals, being wounded while fighting in Viet Nam and having part of one leg amputated.
“This is a guy who understands” what the VA medical system means to fighting men and women, Kennedy said. “He came in and hit everything that is important.”
The signature injuries of the wars currently going on in Iraq and Afghanistan are traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and post traumatic stress disorders (PTSD), he said, as was Agent Orange to a previous generation of fighting men.
Unlike the effects of Agent Orange, a defoliant used in Viet Nam and other maladies that were at first denied and delayed by the military bureaucracy, Kennedy said Shinseki “knows we need to get on top of this challenge early and to get it right.”
Kennedy said his aim right now is to coordinate a lot of the work being done in separate places. “The real challenge is to get all the money that’s being poured into TBI research at the Department of Defense, all the money that is being poured into the VA for PTSD and all the money going into drug and alcohol research and mental health at the National Institute for Health and do greater coordination of all the work that is going into brain science and research.
“If there is any silver lining to the extra money we are spending now for our veterans, it’s that by studying the brain we’re going to help address problems like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and the nexus of high rates of addiction and substance abuse because they are self-medicating as a result of PTSD is going to be a huge issue that we need to follow up with.”
Research at veterans’ hospitals is important, Kennedy said, “because we track our veterans over a long period of time and we get a full picture of their medical history. 
“What I want to prove is that by really managing (veterans’ cases), the VA can be a really great jumping off point for health care reform,” he added.
Research could demonstrate, the congressman suggested, that by having a nurse helping veterans at home rather than in the hospital, measuring their compliance at taking medication and following other doctors instructions, that the system can save money by keeping patients out of emergency rooms.
“These veterans are in a closed system,” he said, “All of their (health care) money is already in the VA. They are not jumping in and out of the system; they are not going to go to another health insurance system. They are captive to the federal budget.
“It’s a perfect place for us to do this medical home management,” Kennedy said.