Serving Those Who've Served

Back when Tracie Carter left the Army, departing service members were pretty much alone on their journey back to civilian life. “You did the exit paperwork and all of the sudden you were no longer a soldier,” she says. “All those things you took for granted—housing, a dress code, a daily regimen—you didn’t have them anymore. You were on your own to figure out what was next.”

It’s not that there weren’t benefits and services available to help veterans like Tracie hit the ground running. It’s that there was no efficient way to learn about or take advantage of them.

When she decided to buy her first home, it was Tracie’s real estate agent who suggested she apply for a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) guaranteed loan. “She told me, hey you need to look into this. It was a benefit I didn’t know was there, and it ended up making a huge difference,” Tracie says. 

Today Tracie helps provide transitioning service members with a more responsive and better-informed experience. She does so working for Booz Allen, as a field operations manager supporting the VA’s Transition Assistance Program.

In many ways, Tracie’s experience exemplifies Booz Allen’s commitment to America’s veterans and current military service members. Almost a third of our employees have military backgrounds, and nearly half of our executive leaders are veterans. Edwin Booz, our founder, was a veteran of World War I.

“Booz Allen offers great benefits to military-linked employees—our reservist benefits, for example, are best in class—but it’s the nature of the work that inspires vets and reservists to build flourishing careers here,” says Tracie, who’s been with the company for over 12 years. “It’s inspiring to know that your efforts directly improve programs and services for active duty troops and veterans.” 

Tracie’s project, the Transition Assistance Program (TAP), is one of six major VA contracts recently awarded to Booz Allen. Together, they will enhance the agency’s efficiency and efficacy in ways that will help millions of veterans. 

For TAP, Booz Allen trains benefits advisors to deliver an interactive, personalized benefits curriculum to separating service members stationed at 312 major U.S. military installations around the world. The advisors, many of them veterans themselves, will also be available for one-on-one advisement. “My passion for this program is about the positive impact on people’s lives,” Tracie says. “Knowing that you’re eligible for a benefit—whether in healthcare or housing or education—can really make a difference.”

The second contract is the Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) program. For that, Booz Allen is providing program management support for VA’s enterprise-wide implementation of a fully-modernized electronic health record system. This major undertaking aims to enable interoperability between Department of Defense’s (DoD) health system and VA’s, thus supporting seamless care for active duty service members as they transition into VA’s health system. “The VA’s electronic health modernization program will dramatically impact the quality of care that our nation’s veterans receive,” says Charlie DeSanno, who helps guide Booz Allen’s work for the VA. “Updated functionality and improved data sharing in the new system will mean improved patient safety and better health outcomes overall.”

The third contract, the Benefits Integration Platform (BIP), is the next chapter in a story that began in 2010. That’s when Booz Allen started work on an electronic veterans benefits management system (VBMS) to largely replace the Veteran Benefits Administration’s (VBA) paper filing process. Today, VBMS is a highly-automated, web-based application that processes nearly 100 percent of VBA’s disability compensation claims. VBMS is recognized for helping reduce the VA disability claims backlog to its lowest point in history, and for helping reduce the average claim decision wait time to about 91 days, a 191-day reduction from its 282-day worst. This new paperless system not only processes claims faster and more efficiently, it does so with a 98 percent rating accuracy. In February 2017, VBMS processed its 5 millionth claim.

With BIP, we’re helping similarly modernize processing and support services for all VA compensation and pension benefit applications.

For contract number four, Booz Allen is helping the VA develop, test, and deploy software applications that will assist in the delivery of measurement-based care, and help assess veterans for suicide risk and other mental health dangers. The effort, which will include the development of a dashboard to track high-risk patients, is a key part of VA Secretary Dr. David Shulkin’s Getting to Zero initiative, designed to end veteran suicides.