10 years

of building simple and effective government services

After Nava’s founders were brought in to help fix HealthCare.gov, they realized that better firefighting would never lead to better foundations. They founded Nava to focus on applying modern technology skills to helping government be more effective, efficient, and adaptable in a changing world.

Many things about Nava have changed over the past decade. But through it all, our mission to build simple and effective government services has remained.

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Nava staff:

0
  • Nava officially incorporates as a public benefit corporation with a mission to transform government services, programs, and agencies using modern skills in engineering, data, design, and product delivery.

  • Nava works with CMS to build HealthCare.gov’s new health insurance application, App 2.0, putting the first systems into AWS. Using App 2.0, 50% more people can enroll for coverage in less than half the time, compared to the legacy system.

  • Nava builds the Scalable Login System (SLS), which provides authentication and account management for tens of millions of people on HealthCare.gov. The system performs flawlessly with a load of one billion users — 50 times the number of users in HealthCare.gov’s current system. SLS is 90% cheaper to build and maintain than the legacy system, and immediately eliminates 70% of production outages upon launch.

Nava staff:

10
  • Nava wins their first prime contract to build the core reporting architecture for the Quality Payment Program (QPP), the largest modern change to Medicare since the 1960s. QPP rewards doctors for the quality of care rather than volume of services, ensuring the best outcomes for 55 million Medicare Part B beneficiaries. 

  • Nava wins their first contract with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) working on VA Caseflow, an open source suite of products that empowers VA employees to increase timely, accurate appeals decisions and improve the Veteran experience. Caseflow will go on to win the 2021 FedHealth IT Innovation Award.

Nava staff:

22
  • In partnership with CMS, Code for America, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Nava travels the country to interview people who rely on and manage the social safety net. This work leads to Nava’s pilot project with Vermont the following year and is their first exploration into philanthropic funding.

  • Nava expands SLS to MyMedicare.gov, where more than 34 million account holders view benefits and manage claims.

  • Building on the U.S. Web Design System, Nava creates the first open source design system for CMS that’s 508-compliant, responsive, and consistent. The following year, CMS begins requiring the use of the CMS Design System for new development projects, and other agencies adopt the system as well.

Nava staff:

56
  • Nava wins its first state contract helping Vermont integrate the eligibility and enrollment processes for all of its 37 healthcare and financial benefit programs. Our test programs reduced the amount of time from application submission to benefits processing by 40%. 

  • Nava builds the first open application programming interface (API) for Medicare's QPP, improving value-based care and service delivery for over 34 million Medicare Part B beneficiaries. The API goes on to win a 2018 FedHealthIT Innovation Award.  

  • Nava begins hiring for its first fully remote roles outside of Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and New York City.

Nava staff:

49
  • Nava begins work on CMS Cloud, a massive project that will help CMS quadruple the number of applications supported by the AWS and Azure clouds without increasing unit costs or workloads. Our work will save CMS tens of millions of dollars per year, cut developer onboarding time from 2 months to 2 days, and reduce high severity incidents by 80%.

  • Nava implements new legislation at VA that makes the claims and appeals process more efficient and transparent. Nava also helps redesign VA.gov, streamlining over 300 web pages and making it easier for 10 million Veterans and their caregivers to find, understand, and use information about health care and benefits.

Nava staff:

92
  • Nava partners with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on ReportStream, a data pipeline that enables public health departments to quickly receive data, such as COVID-19 test results. ReportStream has helped deliver over 40,000,000 test results, saving 852,000 hours of manual reporting time. 

  • Nava helps CMS unify seven websites into MyMedicare.gov, offering self-service options for nearly 70 million people who rely on Medicare. Nava also partners with CMS on the Medicare Payment System Modernization (MPSM) to create a flexible, scalable system that can adapt to evolving policy needs, support the public. In 2021, these systems processed over $829 billion in Medicare claims, over over $1B per day.

  • Nava works with VA to offer virtual tele-hearings so that Veterans can proceed with secure, confidential, and convenient benefit appeals during the pandemic. VA is now poised to hold over 1,000 hearings per week —  about 50 percent more than before virtual tele-hearings.

Nava staff:

190
  • The Commonwealth of Massachusetts launches their paid family and medical leave (PFML) program, which Nava helped design and build from the ground up to be the gold-standard. As of June 2024, the program has paid out approximately $2.6 billion in benefits to more than 475,000 applicants.

  • Nava works with California’s Employment Development Department to rapidly build digital unemployment insurance services during the pandemic. Over a million claimants successfully use the system in the following months during a public health emergency.

  • Nava wins the MPSM Replicated Data Access API contract — CMS’s first initiative to securely stream a high volume of Medicare claims data with external care providers in near-real-time, reducing dependencies on legacy mainframes.

  • Nava wins and kicks off integrated benefits work in Nebraska. Now, Nebraskans can use the iServe Nebraska application, to apply for multiple benefits and programs like Medicaid and SNAP.

Nava staff:

243
  • Nava begins working with the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development to modernize the state’s unemployment insurance program.

  • Nava partners with Montana WIC to prototype a digital eligibility screener and API that make it easier for people to apply for the state’s WIC program. 

  • Nava redesigns ADA.gov, aiming to empower Americans by making ADA rights and regulations easy to find, understand, and share.

Nava staff:

251
  • Nava helps CMS design, develop, and operate three APIs that serve claims data for over 28.7 million beneficiaries. 

  • Nava begins work supporting Care Compare, CMS’s website that enables Medicare beneficiaries to find and compare providers based on quality. Our work will help nearly 70 million Medicare beneficiaries access preventive care — something 50% of adults aged 65 years and older struggle to access

  • Nava begins building their capability to architect and implement Salesforce solutions.

Nava staff:

351
  • Nava becomes one of the country’s premier PFML vendors, supporting three of the 13 PFML implementations nationwide as the prime contractor. 

  • Nava officially launches Nava Labs, our philanthropically funded division focused on prototyping policy and systems changes within government programs and advocating for their adoption.

  • Nava launches a new claimant portal with New Jersey’s unemployment insurance program, improving the experience of applying for UI benefits.  With the new portal, 90% of claimants submit their application the same day they start it.

Nava staff:

463
  • Nava celebrates its 10th anniversary and passes 500 employees.

  • Nava builds out capabilities in data analytics and generative artificial intelligence, as well as commercial capabilities, such as Azure and Drupal. This enables Nava to deliver excellent experiences and systems by blending the best of custom software with commercial products.