“Amid touted benefits of digitalization programs across government, the need for these capabilities only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed gaps in digital maturity, created newfound backlogs and delayed many tech modernization initiatives.
Between the IRS’ iterative procurement pilots and VA’s claims backlog progress, digitalization work and associated procurement strategies are primed to change how federal agencies operate…”
“At VA, if the agency hadn’t begun its digitization journey before the pandemic, it would have faced a larger claims backlog than it has, said Derek Herbert, assistant director of the agency’s Veterans Claims Intake Program.
Herbert added that VA began significant commercial digitization in 2012. Over the past 10 years, the agency has fundamentally changed from a paper-based business model to a digital process. Not only is VA digitizing active claims currently, but also it is seeing indirect benefits like eliminating duplication, freeing up physical storage facilities, reducing time spent finding records and, of course, saving money…”
“In regard to claims automation, VA’s Chief of Solutions Delivery Molly Gatti is leading many of those projects. She said her team is using tech like robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning, artificial intelligence and optical character recognition (OCR) to automate how incoming mail is processed…”
“OCR is one key tool in digitalization as it automates data extraction from printed or written text in a scanned document or image file and then converts the text into a machine-readable format to be used for data processing. Gatti noted that it has been one of VA’s largest contributing factors for downstream processing. VA is currently using OCR for only a small subset of its claims, but it is looking to expand these capabilities gradually to ensure the workforce is ready…” Read the full article here.
Source: Digitalization Efforts Help IRS, VA Curb Costs – By Sarah Sybert, March 28, 2022. GovCIO.
