The Senator continued, “Today, I want to hear about how VA can leverage the potential of this technology to expand treatment options for veterans, especially those in rural areas, and use it to process veterans’ claims in a more accurate and timely manner...
This is excellent news for the future of veteran's claims!
I went through the process of applying for my veterans benefits in the VONAPP era. As an extra measure, I also submitted paper records to support my claim. The entire process took around 9 months from start to finish to receive my first decision.
However, I have a theory that by incorporating AI and digitization, the role of an evaluator could potentially become almost obsolete and decisions could be made within a mere 9 minutes instead, with a higher level review, CUE, etc. being a manual process that could be tremendously sped up due to the larger chunk of decisions made accurately and promptly.
To expand on that, your medical records could be converted into a digital format and analyzed by AI. The system would then compare them to
38 CFR Part 4—Schedule for Rating Disabilities (essentially the guidebook for your Veterans Affairs claim) and automatically assign an appropriate rating for your "claim".
While there might be some imperfections, is it possible that the system could operate more efficiently? Once perfected, I believe that this could lead to claims and appeals moving significantly faster than they currently do.