Back to home
For technical readers
Read this first
AVA is an educational tool a veteran uses on their own claim. It is not VA-accredited and is not affiliated with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. AVA holds no government security accreditation or authorization. What follows describes design intent. It is not a certification, an assessment result, or an endorsement by any vendor or agency.
What AVA is
- A web application the veteran uses on their own claim. There is no representative, no intake team, and no submission path to VA. The veteran downloads a packet and files it.
- Document reading and drafting run through a managed model service inside the same cloud project as the rest of the application. No document text is sent to a consumer chat product.
- Design goal: every drafted sentence is tied to a page in the veteran's own records. A draft the checker cannot trace is held back and the veteran is asked for their own words.
Data handling, as designed
- Transport encryption (TLS) for every request. Provider-managed encryption at rest for stored files, extracted facts and drafts.
- Per-account isolation: every read and write is scoped to the signed-in account. Administrative views show counts, dates and hashed identifiers. An administrator opens a record to work a support request the veteran raised, or to check how a page was read when fixing a processing fault.
- Identifier masking before model calls where the pipeline can do it (Social Security numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, street addresses). Name and date of birth are kept so drafts are the veteran's own.
- Retention is user-determined. Deletion is immediate on request and removes files, extracted facts and drafts; the sign-in and the paid entitlement remain.
- Model training: uploaded documents and generated drafts are not used to train models.
Operations, as designed
- Application logs carry hashed identifiers only. Names, email addresses, free text, document content, prompts and model output are excluded from logs by rule and by code review.
- Secrets live in a managed secret store and are injected at runtime; none are committed to source.
- Unattended processing runs as durable jobs with heartbeats and a reaper. A stuck job retries once, then opens a support ticket carrying identifiers only.
- Every unattended step writes an activity record with agent name, document identifiers, page numbers and counts, and never extracted text or condition names. That record powers the veteran's "See how" on Home.
- A copy check runs in CI on every push. It enforces a reading-grade ceiling, a banned-terms list, form-number pairing and sourced numbers on every string in the copy manifest, and warns on strings in listed screens that the manifest does not cover.
Third parties
- Cloud hosting, the managed model service, payments and transactional email are provided by third parties under their standard data-processing terms. They are listed in the Privacy Policy. None of them is named here as an endorsement, and no agreement with any of them is a claim about AVA's own compliance.
What is not claimed
- No FedRAMP authorization, no DoD impact level, no SOC 2 report, no ISO certification, no HIPAA certification (HIPAA has none), and no third-party assessment result. "Designed to align with HIPAA safeguards" is the ceiling of what AVA says about itself.
- No claim about any other company or tool, and no price comparison.
- No claim about outcomes. Only VA decides a claim.