All-hands Improving VA’s C+P Claims Process
Federal Agency: Department of Veteran’s Affairs
Role: Team Lead, Mentoring and Coaching, Strategy, Service Design
THE CHALLENGE:
The Compensation and Pension (C+P) Claims process at the Department of Veteran’s Affairs was notorious for being incredibly difficult for veterans to navigate; and for its lengthy backlog of claims, resulting in severe delays in veterans accessing their benefits.
Clearly the claims process was complex: redesigning the entire system in one fell swoop would have been impossible. On the one hand, the VA knew their internal steps well - the various steps, teams, and handoffs. What they didn’t know was where their processes negatively affected veterans. They also didn’t understand the end-to-end veterans C+P experience and why there were so many failures along their journey.
By creating a service blueprint of the claims processes, systems, and teams with SME staff, we could identify both where the VA failed to deliver the right information at the right time; as well as identify the challenges that veterans were having navigating this cumbersome process.
THE SOLUTION
Once we identified where veterans were having problems, leadership stood up a cross-functional team of claims representatives from different VA offices to work on potential solutions. I was tasked with leading a multi-workstream program, starting with training up the team on conducting research with veterans to better understand their experience. This work elicited a number of opportunities to improve navigating and accessing disability benefits. Our collective research and design efforts included:
quantitative data analysis: time to fulfillment, type and timing of outreach, drops in veteran engagement, claim rejection analysis, task flow analysis
qualitative research: observation in the field, interviews with frontline staff, interviews with veterans, and getting feedback on concepts and final designs
Using veteran feedback on a number of these opportunities, we prioritized a selection of products that would help veterans navigate the claims system while making improvements to the services themselves.