Case Study

Impact statistics

• 18 months to build enabling technology for Paid Leave program launch

• Nearly $600 million paid out to 75,000 applicants in the first six months of operation

Summary

In December 2025, Minnesota launched its Paid Leave program, which gives workers time off to care for themselves or others. Building the program was no small feat; in just 18 months, the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) and Minnesota IT Services (MNIT) built critical technological infrastructure and brand-new program administration to support employers, applicants, and state agency staff. 

Nava’s initial scope of work was to launch the equivalent plan requests process — when employers offer Paid Leave through a private plan with equivalent or better benefits to the state plan. After following through on delivering the initial priorities, Nava’s contract was amended to include the applicant portal, claims adjudication experience, payments infrastructure, and integrations scope contemplated in the RFP.

Drawing from our successes helping the Commonwealth of Massachusetts build its PFML program from the ground up, we were able to help Minnesota launch its program on time and under budget. Together, we built one of the most popular Paid Leave programs in the nation’s history.

Approach

Minnesota was able to launch such an ambitious new government program early, because their team valued leveraging best practices from both the tech industry and other state programs, plus creative solutions and working iteratively. Launching incrementally, beginning with the program’s most impactful components, enabled Minnesota to de-risk a “big bang” launch and engage real users along the way, including employers, health care providers, and future applicants. 

Meanwhile, the trust we cultivated with our partners in Minnesota helped us move quickly and effectively. Our team demoed ready-to-ship code to Minnesota every two weeks, streamlining communication and gradually building trust with our government partners by delivering tangible value every sprint. Minnesota also took great care to weave together teams from all departments and stakeholders. 

Strata, Nava’s suite of open source tools to jumpstart projects like a paid leave program build, was a big component of our approach. Strata offers out-of-the-box infrastructure templates, which enabled Minnesota to save months of time establishing a path to production within a secure environment.

Together, these methodologies enabled Minnesota to rapidly and consistently release new code to production and easily grant access to trial users and early adopters. In just 18 months, the state was able to deliver a fully functional Paid Leave program. 

Outcomes

On the full program launch day, Minnesota offered benefits to people taking family leave, medical leave, military leave to support a family called to active duty, and safety leave to support oneself or a family member during a safety issue. All of the program’s components worked together seamlessly, including:

• Integrations with over a dozen external systems. For example, we helped Minnesota integrate with the state’s unemployment insurance (UI) program. This enables employers to have a single login to provide wage reporting and contributions for both UI and Paid Leave. It allows the state to easily share wage and employer data between the two programs to help calculate financial eligibility determinations and benefit sums.

• An employer account that supports equivalent plan substitution requests (for employers who offer private paid leave programs) and the ability to review employees’ leave.

• An applicant account where people can learn about and apply for different leave types. Applicants can also use the account to communicate with the program, check on their application status, available leave time, and payment information.

• A contact center to support applicants and employers with questions.

• DEED staff workflow tools that streamline claims adjudication, equivalent plan processing, provide fraud flagging mechanisms, and tracking payments.

• A single sign-on service for applicants through LoginMN — the state’s flagship enterprise identity verification platform — that allows people to log in to multiple government websites without creating separate accounts. LoginMN also offers enhanced fraud detection. 

• Integration with electronic health records systems (EHRs) of several major health care provider networks in Minnesota. This industry-leading work streamlines the process of certifying leave requests by using HIPAA-compliant API standards (FHIR), cutting the time providers spend on the certification form from over 15 minutes to under five — one of DEED’s biggest goals for the health care provider partnership. 

So far, Minnesota’s Paid Leave program is highly utilized by Minnesotans. As of July 2026, Minnesota has paid out nearly $600 million in benefits to nearly 75,000 approved applicants.

Process

Building trust with a site visit

When we began this project, one of the first things we did was travel to Minnesota to meet with our stakeholders in person. While we were there, we demonstrated our capabilities in agile methodology, building user journeys, and building a minimum viable product (MVP) prototype that we could put into a Minnesota-owned production environment. Our approach, thoughtful planning, and delivery speed built trust with Minnesota and led to us taking on the project’s full scope.

Gathering feedback with usability testing

After our first site visit and with the expanded project scope, we quickly got to work helping Minnesota define the program requirements, beginning with functionality to support employer equivalent plans. Through several rounds of usability testing with applicants, employers, agency staff, health care providers, and community advocates, we gathered valuable feedback on prototypes. This helped us understand if the prototype was effective and easy to use. Ultimately, user research enabled Minnesota to build the program in ways that would reduce burden for applicants and other stakeholders, rather than add it.

For example, Minnesota is one of the few states in the nation to offer safety leave, which provides survivors of abuse, sexual assault, or stalking with Paid Leave to get to a safe location and obtain help. To make sure the program meets survivors’ needs, we helped the state conduct usability testing with Minnesota-based survivor advocates. This enabled us to take a localized and trauma-informed approach to identify what was working and where we could improve. For example, advocates liked the application’s robust explanation of safety leave but suggested that the state consider allowing people to apply without a residential address since survivors may not be safe at home.

Building iteratively with an MVP

Five months into the project, we helped Minnesota stand up a minimum viable product (MVP) with functionality to  apply for continuous bonding leave, or time off to bond with a new child taken with one start and end date. While the public applications didn’t open until a year later, the MVP enabled agency staff to show how the mature product would handle requesting more information from the applicant, adjudicating claims, making determinations, and making payments. 

This MVP also enabled MNIT and DEED leadership to demonstrate progress to internal and external stakeholders a full year before the program’s launch. Additionally, launching an early MVP helped Minnesota to gather and address valuable feedback before the full program launch.

Integrating Paid Leave with electronic health records

Paid Leave applicants in Minnesota need to certify their eligibility through a health care provider or other certifier depending on leave type. However, visiting a provider, obtaining documentation, and submitting that documentation to the state can be a burdensome and error-prone process. So, Minnesota partnered with New America Foundation’s New Practice Lab, Nava, and two local health care systems to create a solution that simplifies this process.

The solution is a digital certification form that embeds the Paid Leave application into the electronic health record (EHR) system of some of the state’s largest health care provider organizations. The health care providers’ IT teams allocated internal resources, including the EHR vendors, to build their side of the integration, which was integral to the success of this workstream.

Leveraging the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, the digital Paid Leave form enables providers to submit medical certifications directly to the state via a seamless, secure, and HIPAA–compliant API integration, with no paper documents or file uploads required. Minnesota is the first state in the nation to offer digital certification directly in an EHR using the FHIR standard.

Streamlining the Paid Leave certification was significant because it enabled the state to catch potential applicants earlier upstream and cut errors that often slow down application processing, reducing administrative burden for applicants, providers, and state claims adjudication staff.

The indirect benefits of strong partnerships between health care providers and state PFML programs will be proven through research studies over time. Our hope is that more health care providers in Minnesota adopt this solution and that other states with Paid Leave programs will be inspired to implement similar solutions.

Launching a successful Paid Leave program

Throughout November and December 2025, the two months before the program’s launch date, Minnesota conducted a beta launch to a limited pool of applicants and then a soft launch to anyone who welcomed a child into their home in 2025. By launching the program iteratively, Minnesota was able to put the program operations and IT system to the test. We were able to quickly identify and make improvements for early adopters before scaling to all applicants and for all leave types. This way of working enabled Minnesota to confidently and successfully launch the program to all applicants on Dec. 29, 2025, right on time.

A few days after the program launched, MPR News covered the launch and published the following quote from DEED Deputy Commissioner Evan Rowe: “Just big picture: Applications are coming in as expected. The online portal is running smoothly. Performance is strong. There’s no latency or anything like that. People have been able to submit applications.”

Going forward, we’ll continue to work with Minnesota to improve the program and add features that improve the experience for applicants, employers, certifiers, and staff. 

Conclusion

Paid Leave is an essential government program that guarantees paid time away from work to care for a new baby, a sick loved one, or one’s own illness. Minnesota is a trailblazer in the Paid Leave space, offering the most-used Paid Leave program in the United States. We’re honored that Minnesota trusted us to help build their Paid Leave program from the ground up. By leveraging our deep domain expertise and building trust with our government partners, we helped Minnesota rapidly build a service that meets programmatic goals and works for the people who need it.