The Digital Tool Measuring VA PACT Act Feedback, Trust

Two years since President Joe Biden signed the PACT Act, the Department of Veterans Affairs’ customer experience measurement and analysis tool VSignals has played a significant role in getting veterans to sign up for earned benefits related to toxic exposures.

VSignals is a centralized system dedicated to gauging the “voice of the veteran” via surveys and other tools to understand the wants and needs of veterans across the country, according to Evan Albert, director of measurement and data analytics for VA’s Veterans Experience Office. He said use of VSignals in VA medical facilities and Veterans Benefits Administration offices has significantly increased.

“We now have about 4,000 active end users across the country in various VA facilities and in the VA central office who leverage their data regularly, extract data trends that are useful to them [and] dig deeper into the data to find emerging concerns, themes, trends [and] patterns,” Albert told GovCIO Media & Research.

The tool also plays a role in tracking VA trust, which VA Secretary Denis McDonough has touted as increasing 25% since 2016 to an all-time high of more than 80%. VSignals also tracked trust in outpatient health care climbing to almost 92%, up from 85.4% in 2017.

More than 1 million veterans and their families received disability compensation benefits under the PACT Act, and VA has delivered over $6.8 billion in benefits to veterans and their survivors. In 2024, the VA is on pace to break last year’s number of claims processed by more than 27%.

Since the passing of the PACT Act, the number of veterans enrolled in VA health care increased 33%, with 333,767 of the 740,000 veterans enrolled coming from PACT Act-targeted populations (Vietnam, Gulf War and post-9/11 veterans).

More than 5.6 million veterans have been screened for toxic exposures under the PACT Act.

Albert said VSignals provides opportunities to “answer critical questions about new initiatives like PACT Act and answer or address inquiries from senior leadership and the VA Public Affairs Office and other areas of VA who want to know about how PACT Act is functioning, and whether veterans are pleased with information being shared about the opportunity to apply for PACT Act benefits and other similar dynamics.”

According to Albert, VSignals is used throughout the enterprise in offices like the Veterans Health Administration and the Office of Information and Technology to gauge the success of VA’s digital tools in aiding veterans. VSignals uses surveys to ask veterans about their experience with PACT Act advocacy, outreach and communication. It then shares that data with leadership across VA so they can respond.

Additionally, VSignals surveys veterans about their experience with physicians. In the case of the PACT Act, it asked veterans if their physicians were taking steps to make sure veterans knew they were eligible for and applying for PACT Act benefits. These responses could be filtered to differentiate those who applied for benefits specifically through the PACT Act, giving insights to leadership exactly on how the legislation was changing the number of veterans applying for benefits.

“When you add up all those surveys and listening tools that include insights into the PACT Act application, health care, treatment and benefits dimensions associated with PACT Act, you can see that there are a lot of different vantage points that we can bring to bear to tell the story about PACT Act and hopefully report to Congress on the efficacy and viability and effectiveness of the PACT Act legislation as it’s being deployed and offered to veterans in real time,” Albert said.

Beyond the VA, Albert said that VSignals is opening new opportunities for other agencies to learn from the program and apply lessons learned to their own survey programs.

He said that agencies like the Treasury Department, FEMA, Coast Guard and the Patent and Trademark Office have been briefed on the benefits of VSignals with the hope of implementing their survey system into their operations.

“When we brief them, they tend to come away understanding that a dedicated, intentional office associated with customer experience is needed. A support staff infrastructure is needed that includes project managers, data scientists, statisticians and qualitatively human-centered design specialists to approach customer experience, measurement and design in a methodologically sound and intentional manner,” Albert said.

In the future, Albert said that he hopes to leverage emerging technologies in VSignals so that artificial intelligence can do textual and interpretative analysis of data to uncover trends, themes and emerging concerns for the agency, such as when veterans are in mental health crises.

Albert also said VA is looking into building an integrated dashboard capable of taking VSignals data and other data sources and uniting them in one application, so that patients can review holistic views, rather than on a case-by-case basis.