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Peake: VA needs young, tech-savvy workers

Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake is happy to see younger workers being hired to handle veterans’ benefits claims because he said they tend to have more computer skills than longtime Veterans Affairs Department employees.

“Getting rid of some of those older-age guys in the work force is not that bad. It gives you the opportunity to move forward,” Peake said Thursday in a breakfast meeting hosted by the Defense Writers Group to talk about veterans’ issues.

Peake said the key to reducing the backlog of disability and benefits claims from veterans and their families will be technology — especially making active-duty medical records electronically available to quickly determine if a veteran’s injury or illness is connected to military service.

VA expects to receive almost 900,000 benefits claims this year, and has a backlog of about 400,000 claims. In mid-July, VA officials reported that they were beginning to make a dent in the backlog because they were hiring new claims workers and using better training and a more efficient claims management process.

Still, it is taking an average of 185 days to process claims, two months longer than VA’s goal.

By this fall, VA hopes to complete a two-year hiring push that will bring about 6,000 more employees to work for the Veterans Benefits Administration to handle claims.

Peake said a work force with strong computer skills — both to gather information for claims and contact Internet-savvy veterans — will be more efficient in handling claims.

“We are aggressively hiring,” Peake said, noting that he was pleased to see young workers during a recent visit to VA offices in Baltimore because “they understand computers. They know Facebook.”

Sixty-five percent of time spent on each claim is devoted only to gathering records, he said, which will happen much faster once VA and the Defense Department are able to more fully share electronic records that show a person’s medical and personnel files.

Peake, just back from a visit to U.S. forces in Iraq, said he sees progress. Electronic records are being kept beginning in the early stages of treatment and are being transferred along with, and sometime ahead of, patients to help military medical personnel prepare for their arrival.

“If you want to step back into the 1950s, visit one of our regional centers,” he said. “There are piles and piles and piles of paper.”