From 27 days to 12 hours—how the VA reinvented claims processing

The VA has one core mission—to serve the country’s veterans with dignity and compassion. To deliver on that promise, the VA needed to modernize how benefits were processed. The work began in 2012, with the digitization of claims. But it was in 2019, when IBM got involved, that the pace of change really picked up. A new managed service automation platform—ATOM—leveraging UiPath and other technologies was introduced. Today, automation is at the heart of the VA’s operations, helping deliver a faster, simpler experience for staff and veterans across the country. 

Eliminating paper-based backlogs 

The Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) had long relied on manual, paper-based processes, with physical files following veterans through the system. Without those files, claims couldn’t be processed—leading to persistent backlogs and delayed claims. 

Traditionally, it took roughly 27 days to a month just to scan and open a mail packet and start processing a claim.

Jason Prow, Senior Partner, Hybrid Cloud and Data, Service Line Leader, IBM

Recognizing the need for change, the VA began its transformation in 2012, digitizing incoming mail and centralizing intake at a single facility. “Digitizing and centralizing intake helped speed up processing and reduce the backlogs we were seeing,” said Prow. 

As new legislation extended more benefits to more veterans, incoming claims increased—and the VA needed more than digitization. It needed to automate. And, in 2019, IBM was brought in to do exactly that. 

These early investments proved critical in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced a rapid shift to remote working. With digitized documents and a centralized intake already in place, the VA was able to maintain continuity of service without disruption—ensuring veterans’ claims continued to be processed efficiently even as physical offices closed. 

Automating complexity at scale 

Through the IBM ATOM platform, the VA began automating the end-to-end intake and establishment of claims. Integrating a wide range of UiPath capabilities—unattended automation, test automation, and UiPath Orchestrator—ATOM manages volume, orchestrates actions, accelerates delivery, and supports continuous improvement across the organization. 

Documents arriving via mail and va.gov are automatically scanned and loaded into a centralized case management inbox. From there, the platform uses a combination of optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP), unattended robots, and other technologies to: 

• Recognize over 330 document types (including handwritten forms) 

• Extract and validate data 

• Determine the nature of the claim 

• Establish it in the VA’s internal systems. 

Where claims involve complex or uncommon combinations of documents, they’re routed to the reviewer. But for the majority, the entire process is automated.

Today, we process 100% of incoming claims, with 75% established automatically without any human intervention. What used to take around a month to process now moves through the system in hours. 

Jason Prow, Senior Partner, Hybrid Cloud and Data, Service Line Leader, IBM 

Delivering measurable impact 

The scale is unprecedented. Every day, the VA extracts data from between 3.5 and 6.6 million pages of documents and uses more than 400 automated processes to move claims forward. While ATOM helps monitor more than 150,000 transactions a week, providing the insight needed to keep improving. 

And the result? Since IBM came on board, more than 21.2 million packets have been processed. Claims that once took 27 days to establish now take just 12 hours. And the program has saved 6.4 million hours.  

Perhaps more significantly, more than 950 Veteran Claim Service Representatives have been able to shift to higher-value adjudication and decision making tasks—the kind of work that calls for experience, empathy, and nuance. 

Preparing for the next phase—AI-powered decision support 

For the VA, it all comes back to the mission. The organization was storing vast amounts of paper and relying on hundreds of specialist staff to manually move and process claims. That manual burden is now gone. The result is faster, more accurate service—and quicker access to the benefits veterans have earned. 

Now, the VA is looking ahead. With foundational automation in place, the team is exploring how generative AI and agentic AI can support rating adjudicators and further accelerate claims decisions. For example, by summarizing evidence and medical history, AI can help adjudicators make faster, more accurate determinations. 

Every day we extract data from more than five million pages of scanned content and use more than 400 processes to move claims down the queue. But we believe we can go even further with AI.  

Jason Prow, Senior Partner, Hybrid Cloud and Data, Service Line Leader, IBM