The PACT Act Wizard was built to provide a (relatively) easy way for a Veteran or Veteran's representative (family member, caregiver, other) to understand whether the PACT Act may apply to them, affect their benefit eligibility, etc.
The PACT Act of 2022 is intended to significantly improve healthcare access and funding for Veterans who were exposed to toxic substances during military service. The law itself is not easy for a Veteran to read and understand whether or not it directly affects them and their benefits.
How might we help Veterans or Veterans' representatives (family member, caregiver, other) easily understand if the PACT Act applies to them?
In the future, we intend to explore the potential of further expanding this tool (or one like it) to survivors and to more toxic exposures not covered by the PACT Act.
- As a Veteran, I want to know whether the PACT Act changes apply to me and affect my VA benefits so that, if appropriate, I can apply to receive these increased or new benefits for which I may now be eligible.
- Veteran frustration or confusion about the PACT act
- Demonstrate increased PACT Act outreach to Congress
- Increase the number of successful disability claims and health care applications
- Increase trust among Veterans and family members by increasing eligibility awareness and making it as easy as possible for Veterans to know if they should file claims
- Reduce need for contact center or other representatives to navigate basic eligibility questions with Veterans
- Veteran frustration
We want to funnel folks through the wizard into the "Apply" funnel. We want a high level of customer satisfaction to indicate that the wizard was relatively easy to understand and complete. We want increased traffic into the "Apply" process to result in more completed applications, rather than an increase in abandonment.
- What data (qual or quant) will you look at to understand if your initial set of functionality is meeting your desired user and business outcomes, and not bringing about the undesired outcomes?
- What are the most important metrics that track with this product/initiative's success?
- Include links to Domo or Google Analytics Dashboards/Reports
- Limit 5-6 KPIs per product_
| Category | Ease of use | Service completion | Trust/Satisfaction | Health |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| KPI | ||||
| KPI |
- Baseline values for those most critical metrics. These may come from other systems other than VA.gov e.g. eBenefits.
What are the measurable targets you're aiming for that delivers value for Veterans?
- Objective:
- Key result:
- Key result:
- The MVP will focus on the dates and time periods of a Veteran's service and how they may relate to the PACT Act
- We are excluding questions about health conditions associated with specific service locations/times from the MVP due to complexity
- We assume that it is possible to create a sufficient, yet not overbearing amount of content that will allow Veterans to successfully understand how to answer each question. (Riskiest, mitigated through research focused on validating the content itself. In particular, ensuring we can test with assistive devices)
-
What are you going to build now, and why have you decided to start there? We are going to build a wizard (based on the Subtask pattern) that focuses on PACT Act places of service.
-
Why this solution / approach over other solutions / approaches?
- The question/response method seems to be the most effective method thus far for helping Veterans to easily understand eligibility.
-
What have you explicitly decided to not include in this initial set of functionality, and why?
- We're excluding a lot of other health-condition-related qualification information and focusing only on Toxic Exposures and service history.
- This will also be an unauthenticated experience for MVP, therefore we won't have access to any information the Veteran may have already provided to VA in some way.
-
How will the solution / approach evolve after this initial build (knowing that this will likely change as you learn from users along the way)?
- The volume of content/number of screens is an area that we are watching due to cognitive load, time to completion, abandonment rate risk.
- PACT Act wizard (content and branching) MURAL version v.0
- PACT Act Wizard branching logic / flow
- PACT Act and the world of toxic exposure content MURAL: This is a MURAL that helps to visualize all of the toxic exposure content that's out there, how we want to build connections between this content, and how we can use each entry point strategically to drive to the main goal of file a claim/apply for health care.
Include initiatives (iterations, new features, etc.) to improve this product. See the Initiative Brief Template
- this document
- We are going to route Veterans to this tool via the PACT Act info page. We may also consider other tools.
- What marketing, outreach, or communications are necessary for this product to be successful?
- VEO will likely link other awareness campaigns to this product.
- Link to Release Plan TEMPLATE
- Target Launch Date
- tbd
- Actual Launch Date
- tbd
- What date will you evaluate impact after launch (and when do you expect to have your Impact Review)?
- tbd
- [2024-8-08] A
- waiting final content for new results screen
- Submitted Privacy, Security, & Infrastructure Readiness Review
| Decision | Date | Participants |
|---|---|---|
| Exclude conditions from MVP | 4/25/2023 | Danielle, Dave, Mikki |
- N/A - brand new product
- N/A
- OCTO-DE PO: Michelle Middaugh
- PM: Fran Cross (A6)
- DM: Jill Adams (A6)
- Engineering: Randi Mays
- Team Name: Sitewide Public Websites
- GitHub Label: sitewide-public-websites
- Slack channel: #Sitewide-Public-Websites
- People:
- OCTO-DE Leads: Michelle Middaugh & Danielle Theirry
- OCTO-DE IA: Mikki Northuis
- PM: Fran Cross (A6)
- DM: Jill Adams (A6)
- Engineering: Randi Mays
- Design: Jordan Wood
- Research: Cindy Merrill
- VEO: Adam Farina (with support of the Secretary)
- PACT Act partners within VBA and VHA
- Office of the General Council (OGC)
Note: This is something that the Secretary is very interested in.