The Department of Veterans Affairs has announced it is working to reduce the time needed to obtain health-care records from private physicians by using a contractor to retrieve the records from the health-care provider, scan them into a digital format and send the material to VA through a secure transmission.
It’s doing so through a pilot project with which the department hopes to validate initial estimates that a specialized contract can yield records required to process veterans’ disability compensation claims in seven to 10 days instead of VA’s average of 40 days.
The contract also helps free up VA staff to focus on core duties to process claims more quickly, and the VA said the pilot is one of several initiatives it is pursuing to transform the claims process, something it hopes to reduce to 125 days by 2015.
