Transforming healthcare delivery for our veterans
Image source: Adobe Stock/New Africa.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) oversees a network of 1,255 healthcare facilities, including 170 medical centers and 1,074 outpatient sites of care of varying complexity.
This extensive network of medical facilities exists, because there are over 17 million U.S. veterans with 9 million receiving services or accessing programs provided by the VA.
For the Veterans Administration and the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), providing personalized service delivery, customer service and communications at such a large scale is a challenge.
The needs and expectations of veterans are diverse and ever-evolving, heavily impacted by attributes such as a veteran’s life stage, gender, race or ethnicity, conflict-related cohort, education level, employment status, and physical location.
Women, for example, represent the fastest growing group of veterans—almost 2 million and about 10 percent of the total veteran population. Hence, the need to provide gender-specific care and improve quality of care in the VHA has grown significantly more important.
The number of minority veterans also is on the rise. Minority veterans are predicted to increase from 25.2 percent of the total Veteran population in 2020 to 35.3 percent in 2040. Hispanic Veterans will increase from 8.2 percent in 2020 to 13.7 percent in 2040.
Another key trend is that the veteran population is changing. Gulf War Veterans are becoming a larger share of U.S. veterans. As these people grow older, their healthcare needs are going to change.
In short, for all groups the VHA serves, the Administration has recognized the need to focus on the distinct experiences people have as well as the unique challenge of how to communicate and deliver services that meet a more diverse group of people than ever before.
Improving customer service
The first strategic goal in the “Department of Veterans Affairs FY 2018–2024 Strategic Plan” is customer service.
Driven by customer feedback, the VA understood that to meet the needs of millions of veterans it needed to strive for unified Veteran data and adopt a customer-centric mindset. The goal became making access to VA services seamless, effective, efficient, and emotionally resonant for Veterans.
In order to deliver better customer service, the Veterans Administration started to build more robust veteran journeys and personas. The goal was to better personalize experiences at scale and connect Veterans with the right service at the right time.
Experience Cloud is a platform that offers AI-driven solutions for marketing and analytics through the most comprehensive set of customer experience applications and services available. By using audience segments, analytics, and current context – for example, a web page or email being viewed by a Veteran – the Adobe platform would be able to match relevant content in real-time.
Using audience segments, analytics, and current context – for example, a web page or email being viewed by a Veteran – the Adobe platform matches relevant content in real-time.
This tailored engagement model would improve customer service, because instead of mass messaging or static content the VA can communicate highly relevant and more personalized content to veterans.
The digital milestones that help transform healthcare delivery for veterans
The Veterans Administration can improve its quality-of-service delivery and customer support by using the Adobe Experience Cloud to achieve some important digital milestones, such as:
- Provide veterans with unique experiences tailored to their needs, rather than a static, broadly focused experience
- Increase awareness and access to the most applicable benefits and specialized care they have earned
- Measure effectiveness of communications and attribute the impact of digital interactions to the VA’s mission
- Produce value in efficiency by personalizing experiences everywhere
- Enable AI/ML to personalize at scale, leveraging the large amount of data available within the VA
- Fully integrate the Adobe Experience Cloud with VA existing technologies
To learn more about how Adobe can help your agency achieve better customer support through our content management, communications, online forms and other digital solutions, please visit us at: www.adobe.com/government