Low-Code Solution Delivers Highly Acclaimed Support for U.S. Army Families with Special Needs

Challenge

A paper-based process with amnesia

For those concerned about the quality of life for armed forces personnel, a permanent change of station ("PCS") is a moment of truth. There's inevitable stress for service personnel and their families when uprooting loved ones to new locations. Moreover, this is often when service men and women are preoccupied with new roles and responsibilities.

For families with special needs—from asthma to autism or any number of health and educational support needs—moving to a new station is particularly stressful. It starts at the planning phase, as personnel deserve continuity of care for their loved ones.

Around nine percent of active-duty personnel have family members with special needs. They depend on EFMP to enroll for whatever support is needed to treat or manage their family member's condition.

However, the EFMP process had become a significant cause of dissatisfaction—even hopelessness—for service families in need. The lack of an integrated system, the reliance on paper-based registration, and disjointed manual processes, emails, and spreadsheet kludges had disastrous consequences:

• An unsatisfactory, slow, user experience with no transparency
• No performance metrics
• A lack of service-level agreements and accountability
• An inability to report case status—either individually or collectively
• Energy and time wasted on chaser calls and complaints.

Moreover, it was as if the system had amnesia. With active-duty personnel typically facing a PCS every three years, families repeated the same excruciating form-filling and care justification every time they planned a move.

Based on these issues, the U.S. Congress served an improvement order on the DoD. Congress stipulated that the new system must have performance metrics, status transparency for users, and robust case management features.

In the U.S. Army, 46,000 active-duty soldiers have around 55,000 family members enrolled in the EFMP. Responsibility for improving the program fell to the Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation Division (known as "MWR"). This Division has a Quality-of-Life Task Force which led the Army’s EFMP improvement project.

By collaborating with peers across the U.S. armed services, the task force quickly realized that BAM Technologies, a veteran owned software development company, had already developed some best practices that could help them on their improvement journey.

Following demonstrations, the way forward for the Army became clear. BAM's existing cloud-based digital development practices could be quickly and economically tailored for the Army. Code reuse and rapid low-code development significantly sped up delivery, saving months of developers time and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Solution

Listening to users calls for an agile approach

Given the passion for EFMP shown by service members and their families, the Quality-of-Life Task Force knew that input from soldiers and families was crucial for this project to succeed. So the task force conducted a roadshow visiting U.S. Army installations around the world, ensuring soldiers' voices were heard.

Using an agile scrum development approach with two-week sprints and daily meetings with Army stakeholders ensured user feedback remained a critical input throughout the project. Over 1,000 Army families participated in a 2021 pilot of the new system, which allowed them to test drive the improvements and offer feedback to the developers and program managers.