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Public Benefit Report2024

Making focused updates

Systemic change doesn’t occur in one fell swoop; it results from millions of focused, human-centered changes.

Illustration of a family in a living room. An old, Latinx man with glasses sits on the couch in the background and types on a computer. A Latinx pregnant woman is in a wheelchair in the middle of the room with her white, nonbinary spouse and her middle-aged, Latinx mother. In the middle of everyone, a toddler plays on the carpet with blocks.

  • Improving perinatal care in the U.S.

    In an effort to address the maternal health crisis in the U.S., the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) partnered with Nava to create a “Birthing-Friendly” indicator for hospitals on Care Compare — Medicare.gov’s tool that enables Medicare beneficiaries to find and compare providers.

    This new indicator identifies hospitals that are participating in government programs and implementing practices aimed at improving maternal and child health. Medicare beneficiaries (under 65 years old) and caregivers can use the indicator to make data-informed decisions about perinatal care, contributing to the Biden-Harris administration’s goal of making the U.S. the best country in the world to have a child.

    Our shared objective was to design an excellent Care Compare experience by making the “Birthing-Friendly” indicator highly visible across Medicare.gov. In partnership with multiple teams at CMS, we leveraged data analysis, human-centered design, and plain language to meet this goal.

    Now, people can access this indicator on Care Compare on any device, and can hover over the icon to learn more about the “Birthing-Friendly” designation. Between January and September 2024, roughly 54,500 people interacted with the indicator.

    To learn more, read our case study.

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    Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Maternal Mortality Rates in the United States, 2022

    Image caption

    Medicare.gov’s new “birthing-friendly” indicator for hospitals helps pregnant people find the right care, improving maternal and child health outcomes.

    Illustration of a Latinx pregnant woman who uses a wheelchair receiving an ultrasound from a nurse.
    Illustration of a family in a living room. An old, Latinx man with glasses sits on the couch in the background and types on a computer. A Latinx pregnant woman is in a wheelchair in the middle of the room with her white, nonbinary spouse and her middle-aged, Latinx mother. In the middle of everyone, a toddler plays on the carpet with blocks.

  • Helping Veterans get disability benefits faster

    Disability benefits are among the top five most-used U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) benefits — giving Veterans more financial support than any other VA program. Given the far-reaching impacts of disability benefits, the VA Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) is prioritizing improvements to how Veterans apply for disability benefits on va.gov and how claims processors adjudicate claims. VA tapped Nava and prime contractor Agile Six to help improve one step of the disability application process, ultimately contributing to OCTO’s mission of providing Veterans with benefits in minutes, not months. 

    For this project, we focused on the va.gov page where Veterans enter the conditions they’d like to claim for benefits. Once a Veteran submits their application, claims processors sort similar conditions into categories, or classifications. 

    With VA, we successfully automated the classifications process, freeing up time for claims processors who must otherwise manually classify conditions. We also helped VA make changes to the conditions submissions page with an eye toward usability and accessibility. These changes help Veterans navigate the disability benefits application process more smoothly and promote trust in VA and its systems. 

    To learn more, read our case study.

    2

    U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Benefits Administration Annual Benefits Report, Fiscal Year 2023

    Image caption

    To help Veterans receive disability benefits faster, we’re supporting VA as they make their disability benefit application more user friendly.

    Illustration of an old, Latinx man wearing glasses typing on a computer while a young man stands behind him and points at the computer.
    Illustration of a family in a living room. An old, Latinx man with glasses sits on the couch in the background and types on a computer. A Latinx pregnant woman is in a wheelchair in the middle of the room with her white, nonbinary spouse and her middle-aged, Latinx mother. In the middle of everyone, a toddler plays on the carpet with blocks.

  • Building cloud-native solutions with the Office of Personnel Management

    The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) helps provide health care, retirement benefits, and more to over 9 million federal employees, retirees, former employees, and family members. Nava has partnered with OPM as they migrate their applications from traditional data centers to the cloud, giving the agency a more secure, cost-effective, and flexible way to house their applications.

    We’re helping OPM build cloud-native solutions, which means we’re optimizing OPM’s applications to work better in the cloud rather than simply shifting existing infrastructure to the cloud. This allows OPM to take advantage of all that cloud services have to offer, such as scalability, efficiency, and security. 

    Building cloud-native solutions enables OPM to be much more flexible in the face of policy and usage changes. If one of OPM’s applications were to see a spike in activity, the cloud capability we’re building would automatically add capacity to accommodate the spike with no interruption in service.

    A cloud-native approach is more cost-effective because OPM will only pay for the infrastructure they use rather than purchasing, renting, and maintaining physical infrastructure. With cloud-native applications, OPM has a more granular view of what specific applications cost to run, helping them make data-informed financial decisions. By leveraging infrastructure-as-code, we’re able to script, automate, and repeat all of our deployment processes, improving reliability and reducing costs. 

    Finally, our development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) approach ensures stable operations of OPM’s applications because it leverages automation to bake security and best practices into deployment and release management processes. This means federal employees will be able to reliably access the services they need, such as comparing health care plans and checking plan rates. 

    To learn more, read our case study.

    3

    U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Health & Insurance

    Image caption

    We’re helping OPM build cloud-native solutions to ensure their health and insurance systems work for over 9 million federal employees.

    Illustration of a white, nonbinary person presenting to a group of people. There are charts on a board behind the person and an American flag on the wall.
    Illustration of a family in a living room. An old, Latinx man with glasses sits on the couch in the background and types on a computer. A Latinx pregnant woman is in a wheelchair in the middle of the room with her white, nonbinary spouse and her middle-aged, Latinx mother. In the middle of everyone, a toddler plays on the carpet with blocks.
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