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Accelerating the Delivery of Benefits and Services to Veterans

  • Customer Story
  • Cloud Services
  • Veteran & Enterprise Technology

Background

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) delivers compensation and pension benefits to nearly 5.2 million Veterans and their family members. In the past five years, VBA has added over 1,000,000 Veterans to its compensation rolls – comparable to the total number of active-duty members within the U.S. Armed Forces. The speed for determining claims and disability ratings has a major impact on the Veteran’s wellbeing. The rapid increase in claims filing created a substantial backlog, further delaying the claims review process and benefits delivery to our nation’s Veterans.

Understanding the Need

To ensure Veterans and their families receive the compensation and pension benefits they’ve earned in an expedient fashion, VBA needed support to streamline its benefits claims process.

VBA’s overall goals were to intake new mail the same day it arrives (six-hour turnaround time), streamline common, simple claims, improve submission quality, and expedite the start of the claims review process. To do that, the first step in the claim lifecycle had to be as effective and efficient as possible.

Due in part to a 500% increase in claims submissions, balancing the need to increase the speed and quality of paper mail intake proved challenging for prior contractors. The VBA needed a new contractor, one that combined a mature, tailored approach with a cross-trained workforce. Furthermore, they needed advanced technologies that could facilitate the continuous increase of automation.

550M
Pieces of mail converted annually.
36X
Faster turn-around-time for mail processing.
460+
Paper and electronic document types processed.

Our Solution

Combining a tailored managed services approach, cross-trained workforce, and modern technologies that continuously increases automation levels, we support VBA’s centralized mail services with minimal downtime, allowing for prompt benefits delivery without sacrificing quality or security. For both paper and electronic modalities, we handle source material intake, handling, and preparation; data extraction; document indexing, conversion, and imaging; and integration with/upload to VA systems.

Process Improvements

Advanced Analytics Technologies

Cloud-Based Management and Tracking System

Cloud-Based Upload Factory

Secure Mail Processing

Hear From Our Experts

John Larkin

Results

Since being brought on in June of 2020, GovCIO has exceeded program and mission objectives. Our impact on this effort was felt almost immediately. In addition to successfully and efficiently scanning and converting approximately 180,000 images and 190,000 electronic mail packets daily,  1.85 million pieces of mail weekly, and over 500 million images annually, some of our most notable accomplishments have included:

  • Lowering mail turn-around time (TAT) by 36-times, increased efficiency, and minimized issues and errors that typically bottleneck the process, helping the VA realize their same day benefit processing goal.
  • Meeting and exceeding SLAs for image, extraction, and indexing quality (>= 99% quality).
  • Increasing image processing to over six million images each month across 460+ document types of electronic and paper mail
  • Rapidly piloting, testing, and then subsequently deploying digitized military records to accelerate processing of Veteran healthcare claims.
  • Piloting an innovative solution that allow direct electronic submission of specific types of claims by the Veteran to eliminate troublesome backlogs.

GovCIO’s quality measures, process improvement, data extraction, and management tools have continually increased the quality of our performance and led VA to name us the sole vendor for all paper and electronic mail intake.