Improving Performance in the Integrated Disability Evaluation System

The Department of Veterans Affairs VA and the Department of Defense DoD have instituted a jointly managed disability evaluation process. This process began as the Disability Evaluation System Pilot DES-P, which was initiated in the National Capitol Region NCR, and it eventually expanded to 27 sites. The pilot was declared a success and is now being rolled out world-wide as the Integrated Disability Evaluation System IDES. In the departments joint report to Congress dated August 31, 2010, the data in the report illustrate that processing time has increased consistently since February 2010. Further, while 10,698 Army Soldiers had entered the process by January 2011, only 26 managed to complete the process, and the Armys case processing time for a Soldier in IDES grew from 294 days in October 2010 to 302 days by January 2011. In concert with this growth in processing time, the IDES is planned to increase in size by roughly double during fiscal year 2011. Failure to address the IDES programs declining performance impacts the Armys population of medically nondeployable Soldiers and, as a consequence, it impacts medical readiness and Army Force Generation ARFORGEN. This paper proposes a more comprehensive, data-driven performance management system for the execution of the IDES program. The paper also presents metrics to monitor work in process as well as completed work, and proposes automation system changes to better monitor performance and respond to surges for both the VA and DoD partners.