Re-Designing the First Impression: Hacking VA Intake Forms
By: Vha Innovation Ecosystem
Tags: Mental Health, Hackathons, Veterans

Simultaneously, in Atlanta and Boston, a coalition of Veterans, VA Employees, Innovators and Designers joined together to re-design VA intake forms

The air is warm. The heat and humidity of summer approaches. The VA Atlanta Medical Center emerges from the rustling leafy trees of Decatur, Georgia.

The Boston sidewalks start to dry after a cool morning rain. There is a familiar chill in the air, more suited to October than early May. Entering the Mad*Pow office provides a comforting warmth.

In Atlanta, Anita, Tom, Kaya and Lena gather around a polished wood table in an unassuming conference room, tucked off the third floor of VA Atlanta Medical Center. In Boston, movable desks are wheeled into ever-changing structures along the exposed brick walls, while a hammock is tucked away behind a projector screen. In both Atlanta and Boston, coffees are sipped and donuts nibbled on for energy. It’s 8:45am on a Saturday. Why are they here?

To design the first impression.

Every day across the country veterans make the decision to seek mental health support. They often have to overcome stigma and challenges of self-awareness to reach this “turning point”. When they do, it marks a significant moment toward a journey for well-being but it’s just the start. Veterans engaging with VA for mental healthcare support (both benefits and care) must fill out paperwork to gain access.

In Atlanta, Veterans and VBA employees review the original forms

This is not an unusual requirement for any service sought — VA or otherwise. However these forms can often be barriers to care, and burdens that veterans feel they must carry on their own. We want to make it clearer and easier (for both veterans and providers); we want to lower barriers to care and remove as many burdens as possible on the path toward gaining support. And so — we decided to redesign some of the key forms with which veterans interact.

A path to improved access to mental health support

Making the decision to seek out mental health services can be challenging enough, accessing those services shouldn’t be a struggle. This insight is one of many identified in VACI’s Veteran Access to Mental Health Services report. By using human-centered design discovery methods to understand Veterans’ needs and experiences throughout their journey of accessing mental health services, the data and Veterans’ experiences illuminated where we need to better support Veterans and their support networks. To focus our inquiry into Veterans’ experiences when accessing mental healthcare, we identified four critical phases for exploration, spanning their time in military service, to the point of receiving mental healthcare. We focused on ‘turning point’ moments, when Veterans decide to seek care and their subsequent experiences seeking care to fit their needs.

What we learned and heard from Veterans, their supporters, caregivers, clinicians, and VA employees, informed opportunities to improve access to care. From quick wins, that would immediately improve access to care, to longer system transformations to establish VA as a model for best entry into healthcare. Re-designing the first impression VA makes — the intake forms — is an immediate opportunity to improve Veterans’ access to care.

Charged with their goal to ‘create a better experience for Veterans seeking mental health support by redesigning confusing and unwieldy forms’, Veterans, VA employees, designers and innovators gathered in both Atlanta and Boston to participate in hackathons (or design-a-thon) to redesign a few VA intake forms (benefits and care). #HackTheForms brought together a community of people eager to support our veterans. In Atlanta, VA employees from the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA; a core service within VA) collaborated with innovators to design better approaches for capturing the necessary and important (read: legally required) information. In Boston, designers who have seen how mental health affected their family and friends, teamed-up with Veterans to design a more intuitive and encouraging form. Throughout the day, teams eagerly discussed, designed, iterated, and built prototypes of the intake forms.

Innovation in Motion.

Hackathons are an intrinsic innovation for the VA. By engaging Veterans and their community directly and intimately in the design process, we can ensure they hold a meaningful and tangible role in shaping the support they receive and their experience with VA. Hackathons enable the experience and needs of veterans to guide the design and outcomes of VA processes and services. VA employees, often confined to their areas of responsibilities and tasks, are able to step outside the narrow constraints of their role to use their years of experience providing services to Veterans and their caregivers to work collaboratively with those Veterans and design a better solution. The employment of hackathons across VA has been enabled, in part, by the VA Innovators Network Accelerator Program.