How it works
Five stages, and a record of where every finding came from
Your file goes in as documents and comes out as a readiness result you can act on. Here is exactly what happens in between, and why each step exists.
The pipeline
Each stage carries its work forward
Nothing is inferred from thin air. Every stage hands the next one a finding plus the document it came from.
Bring the records in
Your eFolder is pulled through an authorized connection, or you upload documents directly. Nothing is analyzed until it is in the system with a fingerprint recorded, so the file being analyzed is provably the file you provided.
Read every page
Documents arrive in every condition imaginable: clean digital PDFs, scanned paper, photographs of paper, faded carbon copies, typewriter pages with handwriting in the margin. Each document is inspected first. If it already contains machine-readable text, that text is used. If it is an image, it goes to optical character recognition.
Understand the medical language
Extracted text goes through clinical language processing that handles what a plain keyword search cannot. This is where most of the accuracy lives, and where most tools quietly fail.
Match findings to what your condition requires
Each finding is checked against the evidence requirements for the condition you selected, written from the rating criteria and the adjudication manual and kept as readable policy rather than buried in code. Findings are separated by when they happened, because service connection depends on that distinction.
Produce the result
The readiness score, the tier, the gap list, the evidence breakdown, and the cross-condition findings, each tied back to the documents that produced it.
Stage 3, in detail
Why a keyword search is not enough
These are the rules that separate a readiness score you can trust from a number that makes you feel good on the way to a denial.
Negation
“Patient denies chest pain” does not mean chest pain.
“No evidence of sleep apnea” is not evidence of sleep apnea. A system that misses this inflates your readiness score with findings that are not there.
Whose condition it is
“Family history of diabetes” is not your diabetes.
A buddy statement where the witness describes their own tinnitus is not evidence of yours.
Where it appears in the document
A diagnosis under Assessment outweighs the same word in a list of things ruled out.
Section position changes what a mention means, so it changes how much weight the finding carries.
Abbreviations in context
MI in a service record is not myocardial infarction.
APR next to a date is April. A frequency number on an audiogram is a frequency, not a medical concept. “Middle initial” must not become “middle ear.”
Damaged vocabulary
TINITUS still matches tinnitus.
Millions of clinical terms, synonyms, misspellings, and the OCR errors that come with old paper.
The principle
Detectors find facts. Policy written from the regulations decides what those facts mean. Nothing in between invents evidence.
Two speeds
An answer now, and a deeper answer running behind it
Fast track
Answers the condition you asked about, so you are not left waiting on a full read of the file.
Heavy track
Keeps running in the background across your whole file and every condition. This is what surfaces the claims you did not ask about.
After the result
Then you close the gaps and run it again
Knowing a document is missing is only useful if you can go get it. Each gap points at the right source: your VA treatment records, a private provider, the National Personnel Records Center for service records, or a former unit member for a buddy statement.
When you obtain the document, upload it and re-run. The system shows you a before-and-after: what changed, which gaps closed, and whether your tier moved. You can watch a claim go from Further Development to ACE-ready as the evidence lands, and you know precisely which document did it.
Gap severity
- CriticalYour claim likely fails without it
- A required diagnostic study. A current diagnosis. Evidence connecting the condition to your service.
- ImportantIt can succeed without it, but it is weaker
- ICD-10 coding on a diagnosis. Records showing how the condition affects your work and daily life.
- HelpfulIt strengthens the file
- Buddy statements. Additional treatment records.
Next step
See what your own file already proves
The analysis is only useful if it is honest about what is missing. That is the part we built first.