Questions and answers

Frequently asked questions

Written for travel office staff, facility administrators, contracting officers and veterans. If your question is not here, send it to us.

How does VA beneficiary travel reimbursement work today?

A veteran travels to an approved appointment, then files a travel claim — online, on paper, or at a kiosk — asserting that the visit happened. A travel office reviews the claim, confirms attendance against the appointment record, computes round-trip mileage minus the applicable deductible, adds any authorized meals, lodging or ticket costs, and releases payment to the bank account on file. Most of the delay comes from proving attendance and moving the claim between offices, not from the payment itself.

What does VAVerifyCare (VAVC) actually do?

VAVC turns the front-desk check-in into the validation event. When a clerk marks a veteran present on the non-clinical portion of the appointment record, VAVC records a verified attendance event, computes the reimbursable amount from the addresses already on file, and notifies every subscribed office at once — Travel Pay, records, and any other office a facility configures. The veteran does not file a separate claim.

Is VAVerifyCare a VA website or a government system?

No. VAVerifyCare.com (VAVC) is a commercial product of The Concept Factory, LLC, a Virginia limited liability company. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. VAVC is designed to connect to VA and community-care systems as a vendor platform under a license or subscription.

How do community care sites report attendance to the VA?

Two ways. A site with a capable EHR posts an attendance event to a single documented endpoint, mapping a handful of fields from its scheduling record. A site without integration budget uses the VAVC web console: the front desk marks attendance in the browser and VAVC delivers the same event. Either way the community site never uploads its full schedule or any clinical content.

Does VAVC handle protected health information?

VAVC deliberately stays outside the clinical record. What crosses the boundary is the veteran identifier and name, the facility and appointment identifiers, one non-clinical attendance flag (attended, no-show, or emergency walk-in), the time and station that recorded it, and the computed travel amounts. Diagnoses, notes, results, medications and codes never cross.

How does VAVC reduce improper travel payments?

Every payment traces to a single verified attendance event recorded at the point of care, with a two-mark validation (veteran attestation plus clerk confirmation) and an append-only audit log. Amounts are computed from addresses of record rather than typed in during manual review, which removes the categories of error that public audit reporting attributes to hand processing.

What does VAVC cost?

Facility subscriptions are annual and sized by claim volume, starting at $18,000 per site per year for a community clinic and $42,000 per year for a VA medical center, with a volume quote for a VISN or regional network. A government enterprise license covers platform rights across the Veterans Health Administration. A 90-day paid single-site pilot is available so a facility can start without a national contract.

How long does a facility take to go live?

A console-only site can be live in days: register the facility, configure the subscriber offices to notify, and train the front desk on one checkbox. An integrated site depends on its EHR vendor's change window; the field mapping itself is roughly a dozen fields against one endpoint.

Can a veteran correct a mistake in their record?

The veteran view is read-only by design. Corrections go through the facility travel office by phone so an accountable human makes the change and the audit log records who made it and when. That is a deliberate control, not a missing feature.

Who built VAVerifyCare?

VAVC was built by Don "Corky" Mitchell, founder and CEO of The Concept Factory, LLC. He is a disabled U.S. Air Force veteran and retired Major who flew Special Operations helicopters, and was the second African American in history to fly the aircraft he crewed. He designed VAVC after running into repeated travel-reimbursement friction during treatment for head and neck cancer.