Processing disability benefit claims is complex, manually intensive, and time-consuming work. Veteran claims consist of up to 1,300 pages of documentation, much of which arrives at VA in “unstructured files”: unscannable PDFs, copies of records, and even handwritten doctors’ notes. Veteran Services Representatives (VSRs) have to read, understand, and summarize all this information just to get a complete picture of each Veteran’s unique situation. They then use what they learned to complete required internal documents that enable the agency to accurately determine a disability rating and the resulting level of compensation. 

In 2022, VA found itself at a crossroads. The Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act had expanded health care and benefits eligibility for an estimated 5 million Veterans. The VA hired a record-breaking 3,000 new employees, but that wasn’t enough to stay ahead of the number of claims the agency was receiving—a total that surged to thousands per day. 

To help, Booz Allen coupled deep mission understanding with advanced technology to deliver solutions that both met this challenge and provided reusable capabilities for further claims processing efficiencies.

Working side-by-side with teams at VA, our engineers built and deployed a suite of AI-powered solutions that work in concert to automate and accelerate routine, manually intensive tasks and reduce the average days to complete claims. 

• Automated Issue Management: Built and delivered to production just four months after the signing of the PACT ACT, this automation solution breaks individual claims into smaller pieces for parallel processing—dramatically speeding up the work. In less than two years, it has helped speed up the processing of more than 336,000 Veteran claims. 

• Smart Search: This AI-powered document processing service has ingested more than a billion Veteran documents. It lets VSRs quickly filter down the vast amounts of paperwork in a Veteran’s eFolder to only the content relevant for the claim. As a result, document review during claim development is up to nine times more efficient. 

• AI-enabled document completion: Our engineers applied an AI approach to make it easier for VSRs to complete required internal paperwork related to Veteran exposure to toxins. The solution uses machine learning to search through a Veteran’s submitted documents for specific service information, then auto-populates answers to questions that correlate a Veteran’s claimed disabilities to their exposure to toxins. This AI solution has already saved VA upwards of 72,000 processing hours.

Our solutions have succeeded because our team didn’t just bring advanced technology to the table – we used our deep knowledge of VA’s systems to effectively collaborate with agency partners and deliver results quickly. 

Today, the claims development phase, which has historically been the longest of the VA benefits process, has been accelerated without lowering quality standards. VSRs report that the tools make them both faster and more accurate, and Veterans are rapidly receiving life-changing benefits. 

Looking forward, the solutions Booz Allen and VA developed have given the agency a massive repository of data on which it can train AI models. By extracting and structuring more than a billion documents of Veteran records, including handwritten clinician notes, VA now has computable evidence that it can use to drive decision support, triage missing documentation earlier in the intake process, surface likely next actions for a claim, and highlight risk areas like “missing required exam” or “missing evidence”—all of which will empower the agency to continue improving its processes and provide Veterans with the support they earned through service to our nation.