Digitizing forms and personalizing experiences for better veterans benefits management and customer support

Challenge: Veterans and their families use VA.gov to access benefits like health care, disability, education, and pension. Many of these services are accessed via forms that are collectively used or downloaded over two million times per month. These services often require veterans to use paper forms and input the same data repeatedly across various platforms. With multiple VA staff needed to process each paper form, a cost of $500k to digitize each form, and hundreds of forms left undigitized, veterans face delayed access to the benefits they’ve earned.

Approach: With TMF support, VA is digitizing and centralizing forms at scale to:

• Improve personalization of forms and eliminate repetition
• Improve data visualization in tools used by medical staff, to aid clinical decisions
• Reduce the cost of digitizing a form by at least 50% and reduce custom code by at least 20%
• Save VA customers 2.5 days per form in effort required by paper forms

VA is partnering with U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) to:

• Create low- to no-code form building capabilities
• Contribute reusable code and research findings back to USWDS in a format that can be readily scaled and deployed by other agencies