Transforming VA Benefits Intake: From Paper to Data-Driven Decisions in 90 Days

The Challenge

When Veterans and survivors apply for burial allowances, nursing home care, or aid and attendance benefits, they need answers quickly. But for years, these applications arrived at VA as paper forms or static PDFs, creating delays at every stage of processing.

Paper and static PDF submissions meant incomplete or inconsistent data, manual data entry, and multiple follow-up requests, or "development letters," that extended already-stressful waits. This was particularly taxing for multi-party forms, where a Veteran must coordinate with medical providers or employers.

In addition, the forms were historically optimized only for the front-end Veteran experience, ignoring the back-end processing efficiency. VA adjudicators spent hours manually reviewing submissions just to determine if they were complete enough to process. And, without structured data, the BIO team couldn't see where forms failed or make evidence-based decisions about improvements.

The solution would need to navigate multiple constraints simultaneously: a 90-day Veterans Day deadline, rigid policy guardrails that prevented substantive form changes, and integration with VA's legacy systems — all while meeting strict Section 508 accessibility standards and VA security requirements within a traditional waterfall collaboration cycle.

Our Approach

We built a data-first minimum viable product (MVP), intentionally optimized to get forms into Veterans' hands quickly, measure real-world usage, and enable evidence-based enhancements. Rather than pursuing perfection upfront, we prioritized a lean MVP strategy: ship early, learn fast, and iterate intelligently.

The project faced an immediate hurdle: a government-wide furlough. To maintain momentum, we deployed a lean, agile team of just three engineers, two designers, and one product manager. The team maintained high velocity internally while navigating the broader agency’s waterfall requirements, proving that a condensed, expert team could outpace traditional, larger implementations.

In under 90 days, we digitized four complex VA forms:

• 21-0779: Request for Nursing Home Information

• 21-2680: Examination for Housebound Status or Permanent Need for Aid and Attendance

• 21P-530A: Application for Burial Allowance

• 21-4192: Request for Employment Information

Instead of optimizing for form completion rates, we optimized for VA's ability to process claims efficiently and designed for future automation. 

Each form captures structured data aligned to VA's downstream processing needs, with full-funnel analytics to reveal user behavior patterns. We built a reusable architecture to accelerate future digitization and positioned the system to support pre-fill, validation rules, multi-party routing, and AI-assisted completeness checks.

The Impact

The four forms we digitized collectively process more than 200,000 paper submissions annually, consuming over 70,000 hours from Veterans, caregivers, and medical professionals to complete — not including additional VA processing time. By moving from kickoff to MVP in less than 90 days, we delivered a solution 7–8 times faster than the VA’s average timeline for similar digitization efforts.

The structured data gives VA near-real-time visibility into how users interact with these forms for the first time: where they get stuck, what information they omit, which patterns predict incomplete submissions. This intelligence doesn't just improve the digital experience — it informs how VA designs future paper forms, which are still required by law.

Adjudicators can now quickly identify incomplete submissions, reducing the rework cycle and cutting time-to-decision. The foundation is set for AI-assisted completeness checks, automated pre-fill, and intelligent routing — capabilities that would have been impossible with paper or PDF submissions.

The project fundamentally shifted VA's approach from reactive correction to proactive optimization. VA can now make evidence-based product decisions based on real usage data, reduce adjudication delays with better-structured submissions, and scale improvements efficiently using the reusable architecture.

Most importantly, every submission now generates insights. Every insight enables smarter prioritization. And every improvement compounds to serve Veterans faster and more reliably — accelerating VA's mission to deliver benefits to those who've earned them.

Aquia partnered with the Department of Veterans Affairs to develop and deploy the four digital forms 7–8 times faster than average, ensuring Veterans can more quickly access their earned benefits.