Accelerating the Delivery of Benefits and Services to Veterans
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.
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
To continuously process mail with minimal downtime, our team adjusted existing work processes and identified automation opportunities to improve speed and quality, and reduce cycle times. Improvements included- 1) streamlining packet processing by moving from batch scanning to mail packet scanning; 2) prioritizing certain PO Boxes by volume and out-sorted alternate media into a separate workstream to maximize our continuous upload process; 3) automating document classification, indexing, and full form data extraction– avoiding duplicating capabilities to lower overall risk; and 4) applying high-contact, human-centered design practices to create more end-user/stakeholder touch-points and interactions.
Advanced Analytics Technologies
We use AI, natural language processing (NLP) and understanding (NLU) to enhance our customers’ ability to search data and documents, save them time and money, and enhance the user experience. Examples of how we’ve applied these technologies include- 1) helping VA service representatives and our managed services staff identify, locate, and reference digitized Veteran documents; 2) eliminating the need to duplicate claims evidence already submitted for faster submission of claims evidence and streamlining benefits delivery; 3) allowing Veterans to identify relevant forms and content via the VA’s website, VA.gov; 4) identifying improvements in VA customer service capabilities through sentiment analysis and keyword analysis of customer-service agent dialogue, as well as social media outlets; and 5) using open-source data sets and handwritten character recognition (HCR) applications to build a core training data set for each type of form we process.
Cloud-Based Management and Tracking System
GovCIO has created an effective, cloud-based, secure Source Material Tracking System (SMTS) along with a custom management dashboard, to accurately account for the status of physical mail packages, faxes, and digitally received source materials. SMTS is a fully tested, deployed and Government authorized system we created to manage digitization of sensitive Federal agency and customer documents. We account for the status and provide full transparency to our customers.
Cloud-Based Upload Factory
We have augmented the claims intake processes with a single robust and efficient hybrid Cloud platform for all VBA claims. Our built-in orchestration and business rules engine has established automated, API-driven, bi-directional exchange of electronic and paper mail packets under VBA’s Document Conversion Rules (DCR) with VBA’s Mail Automation Service (MAS), the Veteran’s VBMS eFolder, and our PMR Vendor. We are adding shared workflow queueing capabilities to enable real-time reporting, more rapid API integration and intelligent messaging, and greater synchronization of activities across the factory.
Secure Mail Processing
GCIO securely processes mail involving all 460+ active types of VA claims and related forms, ensuring all data exchanged is encrypted at rest and in transit. We support a mail volume size far exceeding any other contractor volumes while consistently meeting VA quality metrics and turn-around time requirements.
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.