clients / case studies / government agencies

Veterans Administration (VA)

Goal

A system that provides non-technical help desk staff with the ability to provide better services to VA-eligible beneficiaries, and positions VA Health Revenue Center (HRC) to be able to expand the program in future years

Solution

Two new intranet applications that provided greater and more accurate insight and visibility into patient record data and employee benefits. This enabled a huge increase in help desk efficiency, plus it gave VAHRC future expansion possibilities,

Results

Introduction

The VAHRC runs a large call center that provides services to VA patients and VA staff. Their system contains benefit data for over 250,000 veterans.

Their previous IT system had become prohibitively expensive to operate and maintain and was being de-commissioned. However, it was essential for them to retain critical data from this previous system in the replacement system that was needed for the call center operations.

Ephibian teamed up with the VAHRC to pilot programs to prove the capability of improved systems to help the VAHRC expand its services to the VA across the US.

What did we do?

  • Designed and built a web-based applications that interfaced with the pre-existing Consolidated Co-payment Processing Center (“CCPC”) and presented the data in a secure and manageable format to non-technical call center staff
  • Engineered a pilot system that supports three medical center regions, each consisting of multiple medical centers.
  • VAHRC call center employees field questions from VA patients regarding billing. Past systems gave VAHRC Call center employees access to the billing data, but not in the same format the patients receive. In order to respond to VA-patient inquiries in a more effective, efficient manner the new system we provided contained views of the patient billing data exactly as the patient sees the invoice.
  • In order to respond to VA-employee HR questions, we built an intranet application includes a lookup tool that allows the call center staff real time access to employee personal information, benefit forms and associated enclosures
  • Data is maintained and accessed in a 100% secure environment

How did we do it?

  • Designed and built a data extract, transfer and load of the VA employee data from a remote IBM DB2 database that populates VAHRC’s local SQL Server database
  • Regardless of database complexity, data is made available to call center staff through intuitive windows-based screens that present an exact replica of the patient’s billing statement

What were the results?

  • Dramatic expansion of VAHRC’s services to the VA nationwide
  • Established larger more strategic national role of the VAHRC within the VA