PegaWorld iNspire 2024: Modernizing Workflows For the Veteran Family Member Program at VA

(upbeat music) - We are here in the VA to honor our American veterans and their family members and to provide exceptional healthcare benefits to those people who have earned this entitlement and this care. And so we have five programs that we utilize to service veterans families and the veterans themselves. We have the Civilian Health and Medical program, which is CHAMPVA, it is our largest program. We have the Children of Women of Vietnam Veterans. We have Spina Bifida, we have Camp Lejeune and we have the Foreign Medical Program. And in all of those programs we have over 700,000 veterans and beneficiaries nationwide and internationally that we service. The CHAMPVA has been growing at a rate about 8 to 10% annually for the past five years. But last year we had an increase of 14%, it was almost 15%. We have a huge base that we're growing and trying to service with a lot of legacy systems that has caused us a lot of pain and struggles as we've tried to grow and be more focused on our beneficiary's needs.

So with the passing of the PAC Act in 2022, we know that that growth is gonna continue. What the PACT Act did is it expanded coverage for toxic exposure. And what that means is we're gonna have more and more veterans that are gonna be rated as disabled and then eventually hitting P&T, which is permanent and total disability. Once a veteran hits that status, they are in our care and their family becomes part of our program. And so we get them into CHAMPVA, we also work with our partners and caregiver for those that care for their veteran family members. So all of this means that we're growing at an exponential rate and we cannot continue to sit on our laurels with our technology just being faxes and snail mail, we have to start meeting people where they are. The generation with veterans, they're aging, they're also coming in younger. We have young families that we're servicing. And so with these families and these new members, this is the journey we really take our beneficiaries through all of our programs.

The first step is this eligibility step and it's the most important step 'cause that's what gets you in the door. And so as I talked about earlier today, we talked a lot about how the first thing we worked on was eligibility because making it easy to get access to your benefits gets more people applying. You know, everybody knows that oh, it's the VA, they're slow, they're old fashioned, they're hard to get into. We wanna change that because if we make it easy for you to get your foot in the door, you're more likely to take advantage of the benefits that you are owed as a family member and a veteran. And we really, really do care about getting those benefits to our beneficiaries. And so after they come in, we support them in getting service. They can continue to go visit any doctor they want. We're just like a Blue Cross, Blue Shield private insurance in that way. We really don't manage where you go.

We just receive the claims and do something along the lines of traditional medical billing to process those claims and make sure that our beneficiaries get reimbursed and have their health coverage covered. So within VFMP, our strategic plan has produced for us these four goals, which is what we're striving for. And it's part of the reason we are on our modernization journey. So with modernization, we are working to move the VA into the future. We have an ongoing, something like six or seven major IT projects that we are working on to bring this capability into the future for the VA. And so we talk about our stakeholder connection and that's being managed here, high quality benefits management, stakeholder trust, employee engagement, all of those things are what we are achieving by moving into a modernized world where we can have all of our technologies working together in partnership so that our beneficiaries get the care they need, they get it timely and they feel supported and cared about. So this is our historical process. We would receive our applications, our claims processing. It would come in via fax or mail.

And so as I talked about, we can't just take a fax and put it somewhere. We have to take it, we have to print it, we have to sort it. And one of our adding complexities here is when we're adding a beneficiary to the system, when we receive their documentation, they don't exist digitally in our silo. So we just have to take that documentation and somehow identify it and get it to the right staff even though we don't have any way to identify this person so the system can know where to go. So we have a very manual process. It requires sorting through 15 documents sometimes at a time and getting that scanned into a process. But once it's there, it goes through TeleForm and ends up in DAPER, which is our old legacy document management system. And that system in and of itself was really slow. It wasn't partnering well with itself.

So you couldn't move things around, you couldn't remove things, you can't add things. It's just kind of once it's there, it's stuck. So it's digital but it doesn't move. We can't mark it as complete, we can't move it around, we can't get it out. And so it became this really slow, (indistinct) process for us. And so to move us into the new future and modernize, this is the crazy map we have now. And it looks chaotic, but what I love about it is it gives us so many avenues because some people are comfortable sending in a letter, they know they're gonna get their response eventually, and they're fine with that, that's the way they're used to working. We also people who still love to fax things, they feel confident, they're comfortable in that. So we still wanna have those things available, but we also wanna move into the future and that's where we have va.gov, which I got to talk about this morning coming in.

We have the digital upload capability, which allows us to upload documents directly from our VA partners, from ourselves. We're also partnering with our veteran eligibility system, which means that we will be within the larger VA bucket instead of being in our own silo. So I talked about how in eligibility, we don't have anybody's information until we put it in the system. Partnering with VES means that we can use their data to identify veterans who could potentially have beneficiaries we can help support. And so this gives us more integration and modernizes our processes and empowers us. And so the other piece of this puzzle is that we're going into a future where we are centralizing our mail, which means that we'll be able to receive it, and scan it, and sort it electronically. So my document control and management department, which is a group of 12 individuals who sort through millions of documents, and I mean millions of documents every year, are going to be able to stop getting paper cuts and pulling out staples and working with, you know, all of that paperclip work. And they're gonna be able to sit down at a desk and point things to the direction, and that's gonna speed up the access to care. Because if we can move things to the people who are actually making the determinations faster, we can get people their benefits quickly.

And so all of this feeds into our new document control system, Pega, where we can get things routed directly. So when you get va.gov, those documents flow directly into a workflow that is associated. So if I receive an application, it can go directly to my eligibility experts. If I receive a claim, it goes there. If I receive a foreign claim, it could go to my translators and then make it to the foreign claims processor. And so this is the future of the VA and this is our goal, is getting to this point where our responsiveness is faster and we're working towards transparency so that when you submit something, you get every step of the process fed back to you. So if I'm a beneficiary and I'm applying for benefits, I hear from the VA and they say, we've got your application. Now, your application's being processed, it's been processed, you should expect to receive a packet within a week. And then people know what's happening and they don't feel like they're falling into the black box.

And so the results we've had so far are pretty cool. We have automated and digitized our workflows for the first time. We've increased timeliness and accuracy on the steps for the beneficiary's journey from eligibility to claims processing. I think I talked about that OHI connection earlier today. We're also moving towards business driven citizen development. And so that means putting the power in my business team's hands, having tools that the business can go in and be dynamic and responsive. When policies change and rules shift, we need to be able to move our workflows and adjust our processes in real time. And that's something we're working really hard towards empowering. I've talked a lot about digital upload, but for us that's really huge and important because our teams need to collaborate.

And we've had a really hard time being able to do that. Every step of our journey, it starts with eligibility, it goes to claims, we have appeals, everybody partners together, but historically we haven't been able to share from one team to the next, even within our own program, let alone larger with the VA. And so getting to a place where we can upload a document, I can say, I need this to go to eligibility, now I need it to go to claims. And then at some point down the line, if they file an appeal or they succumb back to us and ask for support, have duty to assist, those documents are available and can easily transition over to the next team that needs to touch them. And so this has been a huge increase for us because we can upload things, we can share things and we can be partners to each other. That's the end. (audience applauding) I'm supposed to ask if you guys have questions. Yeah, supposed to ask. Yeah, so if anybody has a question, please come up.

We've got two mics here in the front of the room and what we ask is that you identify yourself by name and tell us what organization you're with and then ask your question. - [Host] And we ask that you come up and use the mic 'cause we can't always hear. So thank you. - [Sarah] Hi, I'm Sarah Burnett. I'm in an independent industry analyst. Did you have a lot of trouble getting buy-in and getting others to agree with you as to the sort of route forward? Or was it easy to get people on board? - You know, I think I talked about this in my presentation earlier. I think the key for us was we moved from this history of being kind of siloed and separated from our IT and our, like, business over here.

And what we've really seen the difference for this and the buy-in that we're getting is because our business team is in the room. They're sitting down with the developers, they're seeing wire frames, are seeing demos, and they're getting to have a voice a lot sooner. And that transition has been huge for us. I mean, it really has made the difference for this because with my eligibility team, they were in the room, they got to try it, they got to test it and they got to experience that. And so when it came time to bring them into the fold and do the demos and the training, you know, there's always that little bit of shifting and pushing people uncomfortable, change. We had a lot easier time getting those teams on board and so that was the huge difference for us. Historically, we always have a lot of trouble with change 'cause we do, we just receive these, like, products that just don't fit our needs. Now we're involved and that's part of why I'm so excited about the citizen development piece, empowering my program analysts to learn how to do it themselves so that if something we receive isn't working, we have that flexibility. So that's really cool and that's been really helpful having that partnership.

And it also took being a partner with IT, which was a really hard thing for us to develop as well. We've had a transition a few, not a few, a long time ago, I've been here a while now, where they pulled IT out of the departments and we had this whole IT department, and their interests weren't always our interests. And it's taken years to rebuild that connection and that conversation. So where they'll listen to us and support us. And you know, it's taken leaders who are willing to fight for us and kind of climb up that ladder and get to the point where, you know, we climb to the top of the hill and scream really loud and finally somebody's talking back to us. And so that's been really helpful. - [Sarah] Investment in new technology, and having the money for it, and getting the approval. - That is a struggle. You know, it's always a battle to, you know, we're a federally mandated program, we have our funding, A lot of it's allocated in certain ways outside of our control.

And so we do have to learn how to navigate within the restraints of being a federal agency. I'm a little lucky. I'm on the business side, I do the program management piece. My partners from IT, Lamar and George are really great. You know, they're kind of the ones that bring to me the solution and they're like, hey, we wanna try this thing. And I'm like, that's great. And that I get to bring the business end to talk with them and partner with IT. And so I don't have to always fight that battle. I have other ones.

- Good morning. - Curious regarding the- - Can you tell us who you're with? - [Jeff] Yes, sir. Jeff Miller, I'm with PegaWorld or Pega. I'm curious, with the diversity of your community from the VA and the the breadth of differences of cases, I'm curious if there's any opportunity for aggregation or additional AI to help drive aggregation of the cases to help simplify process of the claims. - Yeah, we definitely are interested, especially in reaching marginalized populations and trying to figure out how to empower them. We recently have developed a team that's focused on care coordination and escalation of difficult situations. And so we are trying to leverage our data better to navigate finding those individuals and making sure we're getting them the support they need. And so we are interested in possibilities of being able to navigate that data quicker and faster.

And AI is an incredibly powerful tool. But for the VA, one of our first steps is really just getting our arms around the data. You know, we live in a lot of siloed worlds and we have to pull all that data into one place and then it would be incredible to have a chat bot where I could say, who's not getting what, right? Because we do, we have a lot of things we do, home healthcare, we do skilled nursing, and those populations are at a great amount of risk to get lost in the cracks. And so we are looking for ways, to find ways to support them better. - Thank you. - Yeah. - Marc Hartogs from Anamata, a Pega partner. I have two questions basically.

You described a team that would handle incoming documents to digitize them and route them to the right department. Is that a Pega process? - No. The process of taking the physical mail and making it digital? - Yeah. - No, Pega is after that. - [Marc] The routing also, is not Pega then? - That piece? - Yeah.

- Not for all of it. - Okay. - So we're in the transitional phase right now. So my eligibility, my OHI, my FMPs in that space where they're starting to get those steps digitized, but we also have some other modernization projects that are getting us the rest of that piece so that then we can plug into those workflows and those connections. And so we're working to a point where we can digitize that document control team's work, where they have to go in and look at all these different documents. I mean, we've received something around a hundred different types of documents. Our document control team, they are experts in these, you know, like I came out of claims processing, I came out of OHI, I know about two dozen, but I couldn't possibly begin to sort those hundred. So we're looking for a way to digitize their workflow, leverage other technology to help ease that process for them. But that's the next step in our journey.

- [Marc] Okay. And the other one is, you're describing that by the end of this year, you will have a portal for self-service for people - Mm-hmm. - and the outside facing portal, is that built on Pega or is that a different technology? - No, that's on our va.gov platform. So va.gov is a website that services all of our veterans. - Mm-hmm. - And so that's not a Pega platform, that's just internal to VA. The connection happens when we receive that application. We also have to get a bunch of documentation.

It gets all attached and that packet feeds directly into My Pega workflow. So it connects to the teams that need it. So if it's an eligibility packet, it's gonna go directly to my eligibility teams workflow. - Okay, thank you. - Yeah. - [Srinivas] Same question in terms of the digitization. - [Katrina] Can you tell us your name and where you're from? - Oh, I'm sorry. - Thank you.

- [Srinivas] I'm Srinivas Mankala. I represent DigiTran, we are one of the Pega partners. We are currently supporting VA, I mean VA is one of my favorite agency. Long time ago I have done this VA 214, which is a personal health record for veterans. We have done a mobile version of it. So I love the mission the way you explained it. So I respect VA. So my question is digitization overall within the federal government, it's one of the biggest challenge, right? So I know he asked that question.

So you're not looking for a solutions in terms of the, because you said million documents in a year. So are you looking, because AI can be applied there too. Like, there is a physical aspect of it, scanning and other thing. - Yeah. - [Srinivas] But then, I just wanted to hear, I mean, is there any challenges there? Are you looking for any solutions in terms of that aspect? I know it's a, yeah, same. - Yeah, no, we are looking for solutions for how we're gonna sort through all that. Like I said, there's a hundred different types of documents we could potentially receive.

And so finding a way to sort those and navigate them is a solution we're working. - [Srinivas] So you will be interested in some of those solutions because IRS, I mean I, we work with IRS too, so there's a huge thing about all these tax documents. There's a lot of stuff going on. So there's a solution. I mean, I'll talk to you, I'll get to your contact. - Okay. - Thank you. - [Tess] Hi, my name is Tess Porter. I work with Red Alpha as a partner.

So my question for you, so my company works a lot with innovation projects, very similar to what you're discussing. So working with customers that have legacy systems and they're very attached to them or the legacy process and- - Yes. - [Tess] So I'm curious, when you guys were implementing this new process, did you run into any issues with adoption? Kind of sometimes getting up to speed with using the Pega, kind of end user interface is a little challenging at times. So did you run into any issues with that? And if so, what techniques did you do to kind of bring people up to speed? - Yeah, I think anytime you're changing a legacy system, I mean, especially the one we've had, we're working with Vista, which is literally developed the year I was born. And it's a dinosaur, right? And then on top of that, our system is, you know, it's taking a hospital Vista and it's totally brutalized it into making it claims processing eligibility.

And it's held together with shoestring, and bubblegum, and it's, it's very stressful, right? But our people are used to it. I've been here 16 years, we've been processing claims in Vista since long before I joined. And so everybody wants whatever they're doing to look like Vista 'cause that's how they're comfortable. You know, they wanna hit tab key, you know, like, that's how they wanna navigate. And so it's really hard to get them used to this idea that that's not how we're gonna move through these systems. But it can be easy. And really, I will go back to, and I will say this ad nauseum, it was getting them in the room early, letting them see, letting them have an opportunity to speak, having them be heard, also giving them the opportunity to touch it as soon as possible. So testing started as soon as we had anything that they could click a button, we were like, hey, go click this button.

Even if it was just like one little step, right? Because once they had their hands on it and they felt like they owned it, it really got us moving forward. One of the other things that I think has really helped is my team does what we call project coordination. Within the VA, I'm sure a lot of you have huge organizations where you deal with this. I have like three PMs, I have an OIT PM, I have a business PM and then sometimes I just have another PM from somewhere, I don't even know where they came from. And so having to get all of those people to work together and none of them know my business, none of them know my team, none of them came out of VFMP. And so getting those people to understand our processes and who do you need to talk to, right? Because when they come into a room and they go, I need to talk to somebody in eligibility, they're gonna give him my chief, Luke, well, Luke's great, but Luke's busy. You don't need to be talking to Luke, right?

I need you to be talking to Bob and Sue who are down there actually processing applications. They're the ones gonna be touching your system. Most of our PMs don't know those people, but I do, I worked in those teams, I was on those teams, I have connections. And so working as a coordinator, letting my IT PM know who we need to have in the room, helping the PMD department figure out where we needed to be, and just really getting that partnership and collaboration. Like, I feel like really the role that I have filled here is just helping find the right person to talk to. And that's been key for us. I mean, we've had a great time with this transition. There's always those naysayers, but we have a lot of people that are like, okay, you know, when we roll it out and you've got a defect, right? And everyone's immediately like, oh no, there's a defect, there's a bug.

But when you have a responsive IT team, who knows? And they know who they can talk to. Like my frontline staff know them. You know, they know they can hit up, you know, their partners and just call 'em up and say, hey, I'm in here and this isn't working and they respond. And so they feel like the developers care and that's made such a difference. - Thank you. - Yeah. - [Jake] Hi, I'm Jake Palonis with SSA. During your presentation, you mentioned something about citizen development.

- Yeah. - And I'm kind of curious how your journey went to actually get that approved through IT. - To get that approved? - Yeah. - That's not my department. - Okay. (audience laughing) - I wish I had a better answer for you. My partner who was originally supposed to be presenting with me, but abandoned me at the last minute, was here, I would make him answer that question for you. - Okay.

- I'm sorry. - [Hardy] Hi, I am Hardy with the financial services center. I have a couple of questions. Did you meet any barriers with PHI and PII in implementing this? - Oh my goodness, right? So yeah, right, like everybody's gonna have an ATO, we gotta have all this stuff, right? And so, yeah, there's a lot of different types of Pega platforms out there and different tools. And so every time we have to go through the ATO process, right, it's really slow. We gotta have all the right forms filled out.

And so we did have a bit of work with that, but we were able to find tools that already had ATOs. We made choices based on making sure that we could have them within the security and the firewall that we needed. But it was a bit of a fight. - Okay. And then with the claims part of it, is it more of the claims that have to do with eligibility or the medical claims? - Ah, interesting. So eligibility for us, we don't really consider them claims. We just get, you know, like eligibility. We don't make determinations in that sense, like once a veteran is determined P&T, they're P&T, we're not too concerned with that step, right?

So for us, really it becomes a question of is your veteran P&T, are you married? So we don't get a lot of claims in the sense that I think you're thinking of - Okay. - for benefits. Our claims are mostly when we talk about claims processing, it's that medical claims processing. We do handle some appeals when we make an eligibility determination. Somebody feels like we made that decision in error, sometimes we'll deal with that. But for the most part, our claims are those medical claims. - So who would have access to those medical claims? We work with CHAMPVA and customer service at the financial services.

- Yeah. - So we have a lot of calls 'cause we partner with them in getting payment to claims done, but a lot of people want their explanation of benefits that goes along with that. Does that play a part in what you do? - Yeah, we definitely do work with like, you know, getting those EOBs out and the processes that we're developing. But our EOBs come out kind of at the end. And I don't, that's an excellent question, I'd love to chat with you more about it, but I think I have some ideas. - I would too. - Yeah, it's a very detailed question though. - Okay, thank you.

- Yeah. - Hi, good morning. - Good morning. - This is (indistinct) from (indistinct) We are a Pega partner. We were part of one of implementation with agencies. So my question here is, how long do you think this whole transformation is going to take place? I mean, again, you might not be responsible for the entire thing, but in terms of the document process and providing tracking and monitoring for end users. That's the first question. The second question is, right now you said va.gov is going to be the front end for self-service for tracking, in future, are you looking to add more channels for the users?

Or maybe throw some text or mobile based kind of things where the Pega route or backend engine is going to be used? - Yeah, so we're looking at about two to five years to get all of the pieces that the puzzle, that we've been working on right now. So I have, like I said, about six projects going right now actively, like, big IT projects. So we've got our digitized workflows where we're partnering with Pega. We also have va.gov, which is our online portal capabilities. We have another effort where we're trying to consolidate our intake of mail. And so we have all these different pieces that are coming into the puzzle and we're looking at about two years to get all of our workflows digitized, to make those connections to the mail, to make those connections to va.gov and have all of that working. In the five years we're looking at things like how do we improve our mobile app? We have a mobile app, But really the only thing you can do is say, does this doctor see me?

And that's just, we look at the Medicare and if they accept Medicare, they usually accept us. And then, you know, like code sets. So like if I'm getting this procedure, is it covered or not? That's all our mobile app does right now. The future we want is one where you can go onto your mobile app and you could submit an application, you could submit your claim, you can have that capability to reach us. And so that's really our five year goal is getting to that final step of modernization for us. - Thank you. - Yeah. - [Zach] Hi, Katrina.

Zach Fain, Signature Performance. Just, a part of that five year plan. Is there any further discussion about aligning the family member enrollment process with VA enrollment, the veteran enrollment? - Yes. - Or is it gonna stay in the- - Yeah, one of our major projects right now is moving our eligibility into the veteran eligibility system. And so we're going through that transition effort and then the veteran eligibility system is going through its own modernization effort. So we're just currently working on getting our legacy system into veterans. But then the goal is to make all those connections. If we're in the VA system, then I know when somebody's P&T, I can send them information, I can, you know, get some of that information, that we just have a ton of information in the VA It's just something we can't quite get our hands on.

And so that's part of it, is definitely moving into the veteran eligibility system so that we can have access to that information and get that outreach we wanna achieve. - Thank you. - Yeah. Can I run away now? No more questions? - Oh. - Hi, Katrina. - Hey. - My name's Luann, I'm actually with the IRS.

So a couple questions for you, it's around data. - Mm-hmm. - Do you know if you had problems connecting to legacy data when you tried to do this? - Oh my gosh, yeah. Yeah, I think that's a universal problem for government agencies is getting our arms on that data and getting that legacy data to work for us. There was never really a database for our Vista claims processing system. We have what we call DW, we pretend like it's a data warehouse, but it's really not, and it's really messy, and it's hard to pull tables out of. So we're always kind of struggling with getting that old data and still being able to manage it as we're trying to modernize. Because we're in these older systems.

I mean, we still use MUMPS coders in Vista, so it's hard sometimes to take that data and bring it to our modern systems. And so yeah, that's a battle I'm constantly fighting. - [Luann] Is that mainly done through IT? Them trying to work through? - Yeah, we partner together on that. Yeah, we're working right now in the VA to get our data just across all of our teams and all of our programs to be centralized. We're working on a consolidated database, but in the meantime, as we're moving towards that goal, I'm still having to try and figure out how to pull that data and consolidate it into something that makes sense for, like, my leadership to make decisions and help us manage our organization so yeah. - [Luann] And then the second was, when, for us it's taxpayers, but for you, for when the public goes in to upload their data, right, and then it goes over to create the case in Pega, how do you perfect that data to make sure what's going to create the case is correct. - Right.

So there's a couple of pieces there for us, right? When it's eligibility, you know, we receive the data and in the intake process we like let them know along the steps as they're submitting things, like, okay, you mentioned that you have health insurance, you're gonna have to attach this document. Okay, you have this, you're gonna have to attach that. And so that piece, but then we're also working on, you know, our escalated provider situations and escalated beneficiaries. So we have teams that we're now dedicated to, like, doing more outreach historically, like, our eligibility staff don't talk to the beneficiaries, we're changing that. So a lot of that is becoming, having kind of like a twofold process, right? So, like, on the one hand we're like, you can't come any further until you give us this. We need this information. But then also having somebody on the backend who's an expert.

So I have my eligibility experts going in, looking through the documents and when they identify that we need more information, they're the ones actually reaching out and saying, hey, I need this information. Claims is a little different. It's a lot more complicated. We have a lot more data points, right, for medical billing. And we have a couple avenues that we're exploring to fix that. We receive claims from our beneficiaries. A lot of times they don't know what needs to be on a claim to get it processed. So a lot of that VA portal work we're doing right now is figuring out how to navigate and explain to them what they need to provide us. But most of that comes from the doctor.

So it's usually pretty good, it's pretty comprehensive. And then we are finding tools to actually help our providers do a better job of submitting so that we have fewer times where we have to ask our beneficiaries to submit. - Thank you. - Yeah. Hey, friend. - [Crystal] I have bit of a self-serve question. Sorry, Crystal (indistinct) You said one of the big successes,. Sorry, one of the big successes was that you had a development team that was talking to you, that was working with you side by side to make sure that we're meeting all those needs. And I know that that's something that's not common across the VA, and with a lot of the practices that they're doing.

So from a development team standpoint of view, what are some more things that we could be doing to assist the VA in your efforts and making sure that we're reaching more of the business folks like yourself to ensure that we can make sure these platforms are on a success rate? - Yeah, I think one of the key takeaways here, like, if you're working with the government, you come and you ask me, right, like, I talked about this earlier. Like if you come and you say, hey, who do I talk to in eligibility? Everyone's gonna tell you Luke Davis our Chief, right? But Luke is operating a staff of, like, a hundred. They're managing mail, they're doing eligibility. He has a hundred things on his plate. And yeah, he's an expert. He can tell you everything about eligibility.

I will never get to his level of skill, right? But he doesn't have the time to sit down with you. You could show him a demo, you could show him a wire frame. He is gonna go, oh, that's kind of cool, great, thanks. But you're never gonna get there. So you have to talk to the frontline staff. You have to get to the user, right? It's all gotta be, you know, human development. Like, you've gotta focus on developing for the human that's actually using your system.

And that has been, you know, the hard piece for a long time in the VA because you get navigated, you get handed down to a certain point where you say, oh, our program analysts are great subject matter experts. They are, but they also, most of them aren't touching the system every day anymore. They're an analyst now, they're doing other work. And so you really gotta get to that person. And sometimes that can be hard in a government agency because we become, you know, we're a black box a lot of the time, right? And if you're new to us, and so you really gotta fight as a developer to say, okay, great, the chief is awesome, he's good. Who's actually doing this today? And that's the person you have to talk to, otherwise you're just never gonna be successful ever. - And in talking about human-centered design, as a veteran and use the product itself, so I come in and I use all the same stuff that we're developing at the same time.

Is that more of what we could be doing and reaching out to some of our veterans on some of the changes that we are making and what we are doing so that we can get more insight from their point of view on how these systems are functioning and ways that we can improve? - Yeah, that's something I've actually liked in a lot of our projects is that I have a lot of partners now that are taking that extra step to go out and talk to our veterans and get that feedback. It's also something we're trying to do a lot more now. I've been, just in my role currently, to be transparent with everyone, six months, the program management office within VFNP is brand new. It's a new effort that we are taking to move ourselves to where we're managing our operations instead of, you know, kind of just running behind our projects all the time. And so part of what we really wanna achieve is that outreach and having those conversations with our veterans saying, how can we make this better for you? And so I love that that's something that we're starting to do, but it's definitely something we wanna do more of. - Do you think it's important as far as the VA is concerned to have veterans on your team? - You know, I work with so many veterans, being from the VA, and I'm not, not, I'm not personally a veteran, but I get to work with them all the time.

And their insights, their transparency, their care, I think is critical to why VFMP is such a fantastic place. I never go anywhere in my team and feel like the people are not invested in the mission. And it's 'cause so many of them know somebody who uses the program or their family uses the program and they really care that other people in their situation are getting the same care, they feel like, you know, they deserve. - Thank you. - Yeah. - Hey, how are you? - Good, thank you. - [Charles] Charles Fain, I work at VA FSC. - Okay.

- Yeah, you mentioned that you, you know, you had to go through the ATO process. That was pretty arduous, obviously. - Mm-hmm. - Did you have to have any MOUs for your, how did you deal with APIs, you know, within the ATO process? - George, would you like to answer this question? - [Charles] Okay, all right. Okay, we'll scratch that one. I'll go to the next question, which is, (Katrina laughing) you obviously had business analysts or someone that's operating the business analyst capacity. - Mm-hmm.

- Do you foresee possibly using Pega Blueprint as a way to make that conversation between the .business analyst developer and the end user more, I guess elegant. - Don't tell, Cindy. I haven't looked at Blueprint at all. - Oh, it's a great idea. - It's cool. I'm excited to see what it can do, yeah. It's really hard to see you guys. - Do we have any other questions? Okay, let's help, join me giving Katrina a round of applause.

(audience applauding) - [Katrina] Thank you, I appreciate it. (upbeat music)