The Veterans Affairs Department is making progress on an effort to digitize military service records for veterans, as part of its implementation of a major VA health care bill signed into law this summer.
VA Secretary Denis McDonough, speaking Wednesday at a town hall event at the Washington, D.C. VA medical center, said the agency is in the process of storing digitized service records in the cloud, and developing automated decision tools to fast-track veterans’ access to care…
Acting Under Secretary for Benefits Josh Jacobs told reports on Sept. 28 that the COVID-19 pandemic limited the VA’s ability to obtain military service records from NARA’s National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, where military and medical records are stored.
“What we’re trying to do, and we’ve been doing for some time, is to try to scan every single military record we can so we can anticipate the potential issues, like we’ve just experienced over the last couple of years. So rather than having to go to our colleagues at NARA and make a request to physically pull out records, scan them, and send them over, we have them available at the push of a button,” Jacobs said… Read the full article here.
