When a service members’ career ends and their life as a Veteran begins, the Department of Veterans Affairs has a vital role in ensuring they receive the right healthcare and benefits. As part of determining these services, VA reviews and processes vast amounts of records across multiple formats from the Veteran’s career to extract critical, evidence-based information that informs eligibility and access. This is a data intensive process to ensure every Veteran receives the benefits and healthcare they deserve. However, recent advancements in data extraction technology have enabled the VA to digitize and analyze records resulting in a significant reduction in processing times and improved service delivery to Veterans across the U.S.
To this end, intelligent document processing (IDP) is an essential back-end support in these circumstances. While IDP has been around for many years, advancements in machine learning (ML) and AI have advanced the accuracy of document processing. “Today’s IDP solutions, like Amazon’s Textract, for example, use ML to automatically extract text, handwriting, layout elements, and data from scanned documents,” shared Chris Persaud, Senior Director of Federal Alliance Partners at Maximus, explained. “AI/ML-powered IDP eliminates errors from the moment a document is uploaded by keeping it in its original format during extraction. Moreover, a solution like Textract can extract the data in minutes instead of hours or days.”
Being able to move beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) is another way in which today’s IDP assists in mitigating errors and improving efficiency. “Modern IDP tools go beyond OCR to get context to improve precision and accuracy using natural language processing,” Persaud explained. “In essence these next-generation tools understand what they are reading and that makes document search via key phrase identification much quicker and with a high degree of accuracy. For example, today’s IDP can comprehend tables, forms, and other semi-structured data that’s embedded in documents.” Veterans Evaluation Services (VES), working with the VA, transitioned from traditional IDP tools to AI-powered tools with automated extraction of key material and resulted in a 9x efficiency boost and allowed users responsible for assessing claims to search and filter large medical recordst .
Maximus has championed Textract with VES and the Department of Veterans Affairs and Persaud was quick to identify several other use cases. “For any agency that deals with claims processing, assignation of benefits, or evaluation of records where important information needs to be identified quickly and accurately, a tool like Textract will improve speed and accuracy in decision making,” he concluded. “Not only will this result in better service experience for the constituents, but it will also demonstrate that the agency is prioritizing the efficient use of public funds and resources.”
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