VA’s Paperless Claims System Slows To A Crawl

The Veterans Affairs Department’s $491 million disability claims processing system, which is used in 18 out of 57 regional offices, slowed to a crawl last month due to sluggish response times for claims examiners trying to access veterans’ files stored on remote servers, Nextgov has learned.

The department plans to deploy its Veterans Benefits Management System to 14,400 claims examiners at the Veterans Benefits Administration this year. But last month only 721 examiners -- just 5 percent of the nationwide total -- were using the system, according to internal emails obtained by Nextgov.

VBMS slowed when claims examiners tried to perform simple transactions with claims files, such as search, update, save or retrieve, one email said. VA’s Office of Information Technology determined sluggish response times resulted from “the way data is being read from disk storage. Since the impact was considerably more read/write work for each transaction, it had a greater impact as more users attempted to perform work on VBMS,” an email said...