At Maximus, our ethos is to Move People Forward by helping public agencies deliver services more efficiently and more effectively.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Maximus work together to accelerate application processing for Veterans through AI technology.
Through our Veterans Evaluation Services (VES) company, we support VA’s disability benefits determination. In particular, VES is helping VA manage a surge of more than 5 million applications to ensure those who served our country receive their well-deserved benefits faster.
To achieve this goal, we transformed a manual process with AI, implemented through our own industry-leading solutions as well as technology from our partner Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In the past, reviews of Veterans’ medical records were a labor-intensive process for VES, as case files average between 2,000 and 3,500 pages. With a high volume of Veterans’ applications, an urgent need developed for automation, and Maximus rose to meet the challenge.
In response, Maximus developed a proprietary, AI-powered Medical Records Processing System that leverages AWS GovCloud, Terraform, and AI Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology (Amazon Textract). These technologies, working together, empowered the VA to digitize and analyze medical records at unprecedented speed and scale.
“Veterans have earned their benefits, and they shouldn’t have to wait due to administrative bottlenecks,” said Derrick Pledger, CDIO, Maximus. “By harnessing AI, we’ve transformed how the VA processes medical records—bringing speed, accountability, and scalability to a system that serves those who have served our country.”
The VA has already seen a marked improvement in application processing from this proprietary solution:
- Produced a 9x increase in efficiency through the AI solution by drastically reducing manual reviewing time by allowing users to search and filter medical records with precision.
- Processes 8 to 10 million pages every day, with the ability to scale up to processing 15 million pages during peak demand.
- Processed more than 400 million documents – totaling 10 billion pages – in under a year, making it one of the largest deployments of Amazon Textract ever.
- Maximus now ranks among the top five global users of Amazon Textract, showcasing the company’s leadership in AI-driven document processing.
Maximus provides outsourced Compensation and Pension Medical Disability Exam (MDE) services for the VA to determine Veterans' eligibility for disability compensation and pension claims. The AI-driven system ensures medical evaluations are conducted with greater accuracy, significantly reducing processing times and improving service delivery to Veterans across the U.S.
Maximus has eliminated cumbersome manual data entry by integrating Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR). VA decision-makers are empowered to focus on reviewing critical medical evidence. The solution’s cloud-based auto-scaling capabilities optimizes costs while meeting demand surges seamlessly.