“The Department of Veterans Affairs offers the 19 million living Americans who served in the military a host of benefits — disability payments, healthcare, money for college and more. The trick is to get those benefits to its customers efficiently…”
“’To manage your benefits, you had to go to one site. To manage your healthcare, there was another site. To manage your payments or reimbursements, you’d have to go to a different place for that as well,’ [Charles Worthington, CTO at the VA] says…”
“The VA’s solution was a complete redesign and consolidation of its homepage, VA.gov, launched in 2018…”
“Finally, a growing number of agencies pursuing consolidation embrace iterative development and continuous improvement, [Mina Hsiang, U.S. Digital Service administrator] says. ‘Instead of living in that world of twice-annual releases, now they’re doing automated daily deployments,’ updating to meet users’ ever-evolving needs.
This was the blueprint the VA followed. Built on the VA Enterprise Cloud, which includes Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, VA.gov uses an API layer dubbed Vets API to funnel previously disparate VA services into a one-stop source…”
“From the veterans’ point of view, Worthington notes, this means that when they fill out a healthcare application on the site, links to the resources they need to complete the form successfully are ready and waiting for them right on the homepage…” Read the full article here.
Source: Federal Website Consolidation Eases the Online Journey for Citizens – By Chris Hayhurst, March 3, 2022. FedTech Magazine.
