When Marina Martin got to the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2013, as the Chief Technology Officer, it didn’t take long for her to realize what her grand objective was.

However, it took something additional — something personal — to make it a mission.

Back then, there were over a thousand individual websites under the VA’s umbrella, and three registries within the agency just to keep track of them.

She discovered how cumbersome it all was, as a user, attempting to successfully register her dying grandfather, and secure him with the healthcare benefits he earned.

“I was unable to get him through the process,” she told a crowd at the SXSW festival panel earlier this month. “That was extremely alarming to me.”

Among the obvious technical challenges, like identity and login, was the largesse of her employer. The VA is not only the biggest integrated healthcare system in the country; it’s the biggest civilian agency with hundreds of thousands of workers.

“It’s really, really hard to line everybody up,” she said.

In order to navigate the agency’s environment successfully and execute her mission, she was going to need something real. Someone to lead the way, by example. A story. A service member.

“One of the most impactful things we did at VA was put the lens on the veteran.”

Enter Dominic.

“We went to the [Office of Presidential Correspondence] and found a letter from a homeless veteran who was trying to get healthcare, asking the president to please help him. And we went and sat with him, literally on the sidewalk, and videotaped him showing us how he tried to get healthcare. He tried 11 times, and failed, and this is a thing you should only have to do once in your life. And we had believed that he just wasn’t eligible and give up. But he was eligible. He had tried 11 times with us and we had failed him 11 times.

“So once people started seeing that video of him — he’s super tech-savvy, funny, smart — unable to make it through, that’s what transformed and blew open the door that said, ‘Hey we need to fix this for Dominic, and to Dominics out there.”

Martin’s team, along with many other public and private sector collaborators, teamed up to develop Vets.gov — a single online portal aimed to help veterans better understand and access their benefits.

“Veterans shouldn’t have to go through five, six or eight different websites to find out this information,” said Martin A. Taylor, Staff Assistant, Office of the Secretary of the VA.

“[They] shouldn’t guess what benefits are available to them. So as we start pulling together benefits and services under one website, we hope that … once they go to Vets.gov they not only learn what they’re eligible for, but how to get it.”