The Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) operates the nation’s largest integrated healthcare network of over 1,100 facilities, providing care to more than 8.9 million veterans. Although there are numerous facilities available, it is not uncommon for veterans to travel long distances to reach their closest VA facility. The VA is committed to ensuring all veterans have adequate access to healthcare, including the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), the Chief Business Office (CBO), and the Veterans Transportation Program (VTP), which will reimburse certain eligible persons to offset costs associated with travel to VA healthcare.
In handling such a large volume of travel claims from across the country, the VA was challenged with intaking, organizing, processing, and completing millions of claims annually. With an inefficient system that lacked effective communication methods, many customers were unsatisfied and did not receive reimbursement in a timely manner. The system also created many vulnerabilities, which led to fraudulent claims that inevitably caused delays in processing legitimate claims. Some veterans were even opting to forego submitting claims with a small dollar amount to avoid the hassle of the process.
The VA sought to improve its travel program to elevate the customer experience, open up new forms of communication between veterans and the VA, and decrease the turnaround time of travel reimbursements, giving the veterans the financial support they deserve. These program improvements needed to include a new rules engine and approval workflow, which included automatically approving most mileage-only claims and preventing fraudulent claims.
i4DM improved the travel program with a cloud-based self-serve solution. Through integrating a multifaceted and customized SaaS solution, i4DM created a responsive, user-facing portal for veterans to request reimbursement for travel to VA appointments, a robust rules engine that determined the disposition of reimbursement requests, various source systems with an integration layer, and cloud implementation.
Through i4DM’s implementation of the cloud-based self-serve solution, veterans can now submit reimbursement requests on any device and receive reimbursement through electronic funds transfer (EFT) within 1-2 days. The new system also includes an administration interface for travel clerks and VA administrators to review and approve requests. Many mileage-only requests are approved automatically to save money and time, forgoing travel clerk interaction, saving the U.S. government more than $63 million annually.