Using data science to accelerate Veterans’ travel claims
The Problem
The VA Beneficiary Travel claims system is complex with siloed processes and data sources across VA departments, and leadership lacked comprehensive data about the systems used, resulting in no clear picture of the full process and root causes of issues. In 2024, congressional inquiry into Veterans’ issues with Beneficiary Travel, a benefit that reimburses Veterans for travel to medical appointments, put a spotlight on delays and denials for this benefit. This investigation created pressure for Veterans Affairs (VA) leaders to quickly pinpoint why Veterans were not receiving their payments in a timely manner.
MO’s Solution
MO partnered with Veterans Experience Services (VES) Digital Experience, the Veterans Transportation Program (VTP), and VES CX Product Analytics (CXPA) to provide a holistic end-to-end view of Beneficiary Travel for the first time. Using a service design approach and mixed method data analysis, we quickly pulled together fragmented operational data and conducted stakeholder and user interviews to create a data story that combined data visualization and digestible information to define the relationship between different service components and explain Veteran and VA staff pain points and process bottlenecks. We identified root causes of issues in the complex and disconnected claims process that spanned technology, policy, and Veteran services.
Our data analysis and service blueprinting revealed key insights including that paper claims make up more than half of beneficiary travel claims and take up to 44 days to submit, and estimated that shifting the majority of claims to digital channels would reduce average processing time by up to 40%. We calculated that claims that require manual review take twice as long to process as auto-adjudicated claims, and identified which legacy submission systems typically resulted in more manual review to prioritize for modernization efforts.
Outcomes
20%
increase in timely claims processing
We gave decision-makers the information they needed in a digestible format to quickly understand the systemic problems, opportunities for improvements, and confidently prioritize the right problems to solve. We enabled the VA to make high impact process improvements, reduce manual effort, and accelerate claims processing. In the 10 months following our initial engagement, the percent of claims paid to Veterans within a week increased by nearly 20%, from 68% to 87%.