Delivering on the Promise

An organization responsible for a joint process established by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense that includes a single set of disability medical examinations and disability ratings for use by both departments.

Deliver on the promise of providing medical benefits for disabled Service Members fairly, accurately, and as quickly as possible. In one year, significantly improve the medical evaluation board process and cycle times at multiple sites with site-level workforces balanced to workload.

Building on over five years of implementation experience with the client, Herren applied a comprehensive process optimization approach to further reduce case backlog, balance future workforce requirements, and deliver results that reduced the transition period from the U.S. Departments of Defense to Veterans Affairs for service members and their families.
Herren’s improvement approach – Enable, Build, Implement, Sustain – combined increased staff engagement with the use of continuous improvement best practices and tools within a PDSA framework

• Mapped site current process, performed takt time, and conducted comprehensive demand-based staffing analyses
• Standardized and streamlined the future state medical evaluation board process, for efficiency and legal compliance
• Deployed a site-level “rolling wave” – lessons learned between waves provided improvements to the standardized process and tools.
• Coached implementation stakeholders and monitored site performance to identify and address performance metrics, issues and defects

The result was an enterprise-wide solution that increased case throughput and completion, balanced the site workforce to the site workload with a marked reduction of case processing cycle times.

• Standardized disparate processes across 30 geographically disparate facilities.
• Productivity Average 20% Increase
• Cycle Time Average 16% Reduction
• Rework Average 47% Reduction
• Cost Avoidance $8,000,000 Annually