Our story

In 2013, Nava’s founders were brought in by the Obama Administration to help fix HealthCare.gov after its troubled launch. Although the immediate focus was on making the service available, the team quickly realized that better firefighting would never lead to stronger foundations. They decided to approach the work differently and asked, what would a reliable, intuitive HealthCare.gov experience look like? How could we build long-term solutions as quickly as possible?

Nava staff at the White House in 2016.

Better foundations, not better facades

Over the next 18 months, they built several products and systems that still serve tens of millions of people today, dramatically improving the user experience and service reliability, while cutting call center wait times and hundreds of millions of dollars in costs.

HealthCare.gov was the catalyst for a number of things ready to sprout. It gave innovators within government the justification they needed to advance their changes. It provided a unifying narrative for attracting and growing technical teams within the government like 18F and USDS. It exposed the brittleness of the way technology was specified and procured. It laid bare the need for modern methods and vendors who used them. 

Nava’s founders recognized that modern technology skills, paired with strong consulting skills, could help our public institutions adapt to the challenges of the digital age. In 2015, they formed Nava as a public benefit corporation to transform the services, programs, and agencies that we all depend on.

Progress takes work

Since then, we’ve been trusted by the federal, state, and local governments across the US to solve some of the most complex and highly scrutinized modernization efforts in the public sector.

We’ve worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs, helping to reduce the backlog of Veterans waiting for decisions about their benefits by 50% in one year. We broke ground when we launched developer-friendly APIs for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that transformed how doctors get paid to provide quality healthcare for the country’s 62 million Medicare recipients. We helped launch Massachusetts’ groundbreaking paid family medical leave service, supporting the payment of over $600 million in claims to over 90,000 claimants. We helped multiple states adapt their unemployment insurance systems in the pandemic, reducing backlogs and launching user-friendly experiences.

Thinking long term

Nava is part of a larger movement delivering human-centered software in the public sector. Our innovative work on integrated eligibility and enrollment in the state of Vermont is highlighted in Tara Dawson McGuinness and Hana Schank’s book, Power to the Public. We also partnered with Code for America to explore creating a national model for eligibility systems modernization in five states.

Today, Nava has grown to over 250 people working across the country with federal, state and local agencies. As a technology consultancy and a public benefit corporation, we’re dedicated to making public services accessible, programs effective for beneficiaries, and agencies adaptable in a world of constant change.