I think a lot of people can relate to the struggle of having old technology. You know, a lot of what we still do is snail mail. It's physical paper. It's insane. We also have a ton of fax issues. You know, we receive faxes and we still have to print them rather than maintaining that digital platform. It's crazy. And so everything's really manual. It's hands on. And so we create this black box where we receive something, but then nobody kind of hears back from us until the end of our process. And so they come in and then they're just waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. And then they finally hear something. And that can be really frustrating. So there's all these different teams that are trying to be effective, trying to communicate, trying to get information. So we're using that same process that we developed for eligibility and OHI to connect everybody. But we're also able to connect all these other pieces into the puzzle. So we have digital upload which allows our teams to upload documents directly to each other. So if I receive something like, a call center often gets emails, instead of having to print that email and carry it down to the mail room to get it sorted and scanned, they can just send it directly into Pega to who needs to have it to make that determination.
And that's a huge impact for not just our beneficiaries, which is nice, but it's also a huge impact for our employees because our employees like me, my team is small, we're very small. We joke with the mom and pop shop and they care a lot. And so having these tools that allows them to be more effective is really empowering for them. The key to the success that we've been having with this effort has been that our IT department is really now out of their silo and working with the business. We're really a collaborative partnership now. You know where the business is in the room talking to our development team. We're having a lot of back and forth. And so early on we're identifying places where maybe our developers had a different idea than my business team. And and we can, like, collaborate and look at it and build together. And so every step of the way they're tweaking it and getting us where we want to be, which is really nice, because historically, I've had the experience where it was so siloed out from the business that we would go to them and say: I need a tool that does this. And then a couple of months later, they'd be back and be like: here's your tool. And I'd be like, that's really great, thank you. But I kind of need it to do this, and I need this over here.
And they'd be like, well, we're kind of done, but we could make it pink. So it's always been really frustrating, and we're really proud of the way we have changed that process within the VA. With that change, we've also really been able to see across the board that increased efficiency we've talked about. We've been reducing backlogs. We've been reducing the paperwork employees have to handle. Like I talked about, when we print a fax, an application packets like 5 to 15, maybe 20 pages, and each of those pages has to be identified. You have to print a barcode, you kind of have to stack it all together and then put it through the scanning. And so it's just a very intense process. And we're working towards a future where they don't have to get their hands on it. And we can streamline that process. And these are our first steps in that direction where things are digitized. And it's so much better. And so it's improving the experience for our employees, which is increasing that performance for our beneficiaries. And we have 700,000 beneficiaries within our program and we're growing. We have a future where we see a lot more growth. Since the passing of the 2022 PACT Act, which made disability access larger for the veterans. And so, yeah, we've got a lot to work towards.
