va.gov

VA Health Questionnaires

Healthcare experience — executive case study

Problem

Veterans and care teams were spending valuable appointment time collecting, repeating, and transferring health information.

Veterans lacked a consistent way to easily share and update their current health status, medical history, reason for visit, and personal priorities before an appointment. Information was often collected through paper, iPads, or verbal conversations and was not consistently carried forward across visits, facilities, or providers.

For care teams, this meant spending time on data entry, clinical reminders, medication history, and relaying information rather than focusing on the Veteran’s treatment plan. Clinical Reminders alone were estimated at 15–20 minutes during a visit and were identified as a significant nursing complaint.

The underlying problem wasn’t simply forms—it was the broken handoff of information between Veteran and care team.

Text message: VA Health Questions — before your upcoming VA appointment, we would like you to answer some VA Health questions, with a link to veteran.apps.va.gov — The pre-visit invitation, delivered by text.

Research insight

Veterans weren’t opposed to providing information. They wanted to know that it would actually improve their care.

Research showed that Veterans were already familiar with digital pre-visit experiences from civilian providers and preferred completing information before their appointment, using their own devices and in a comfortable environment. They wanted reminders and the ability to review and update information rather than repeatedly provide their entire history.

The biggest pain point was identified as the handoff of information, not completing the questionnaire itself. Veterans questioned the value of providing information when they could not tell whether their care team had seen or used it.

This reframed the opportunity: don’t just digitize the form. Make Veteran-provided information useful to the care team.

Opportunity

Create a seamless pre-visit experience that turns Veteran-provided information into actionable clinical context.

The experience could allow Veterans to:

Prepare before the visit — complete information at home, on their own device, when convenient.

Update instead of repeat — review existing information and focus on what has changed.

Share what matters — communicate their reason for visit, concerns, priorities, and questions.

Connect information to care — make Veteran-provided information visible to the clinical team before and during the visit.

Create continuity — reduce the need to repeat health history across the continuum of care.

The Visit Intro concept brought this strategy to life through Reason for Visit, Health Concerns/Important Information, Questions for the Visit, and Patient-Generated Data.

Before Collect information → document it → move on

After Veteran shares → care team understands → conversation improves → care plan responds

Outcomes / OKRs

Objective / job to be done. When going to a healthcare visit, I want to share my current health status and medical history so that my information can influence and be used to create my treatment plan across the continuum of care.

North star	How success is measured
Optimize care	Increase the number of Veterans whose pre-visit information is leveraged during their care visits
Save time	Increase time focused on health outcomes while decreasing time spent on data entry

Personal experience

Increase Veteran satisfaction Decrease appointment anxiety Reduce waiting and visit time Improve care-team satisfaction

Collaboration

Increase Veteran questions and priorities addressed Increase care-team understanding of the Veteran’s story Decrease forgotten or undisclosed information Reduce Clinical Reminder and medication-history effort

Seamless journey

Reduce nurse relay and documentation time Increase accuracy of health information Increase pre-visit questionnaire completion Reduce employee data entry Increase time available for the Veteran’s plan of care

Executive takeaway

The opportunity was to move the VA healthcare experience from collecting information during the visit to using Veteran-provided information to make the visit more focused, efficient, and patient-centered.