The Challenge Peraton’s Solution The Value Delivered
The Challenge
Launched in 2011, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Million Veteran Program (MVP) is a national, voluntary research program aimed at learning how genes, lifestyle, military experiences, and exposures impact health. With over one million veterans enrolled, MVP has become one of the world’s largest programs focused on genetics and health. Overseen by Veterans Health Administration Office of Research and Development (VHA ORD) and the MVP Coordinating Centers in Boston and Palo Alto, the program is open to all veterans who can join by authenticating their status, providing consent, and participating in various research activities, including blood samples and surveys.
Historical recruitment and enrollment methods included invitational mailings, phone calls, paper-based surveys and in-person enrollment activities at more than 50 participating VA medical facilities and their affiliated community-based sites.
To accelerate enrollment toward the goal of one million participants, the VA partnered with Peraton to enhance their recruitment, enrollment, engagement, and feedback (REEF) capabilities. Through an internet-accessible participant web application (PWA), veterans could receive an overview of MVP, relevant news, and access to enrollment without needing to go to a VA site.
Peraton’s Solution
To support the VA’s requirements, Peraton proposed a third-party web-based software as a service (SaaS) platform hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud.
The new REEF SaaS system and veteran-facing PWA are based on built-in clinical study functionalities coupled with VA-specific business rules, web services, and VA enterprise identity access management (IAM) integration. The SaaS platform is built in a Multi-AZ model, using Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs), Auto Scaling, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, Simple Storage Service (S3), Relational Database Service (RDS) and IAM to create a resilient production environment for the core content management system (CMS) engine.
To protect personally identifiable information and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act data, the system integrates with the VA single sign-on (SSO) external authentication system to authenticate users from multiple credential service providers (CSP) into the PWA application.
The SaaS platform is hosted in a va.gov subdomain and utilizes a dedicated encrypted VPN tunnel through the VA’s Trusted Internet Connection (TIC) into GovCloud. This aligns with the Federal Information Security Management Act and Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program accreditation requirements. In addition to the PWA application, Peraton manages an administrator web application (AWA) enabling MVP staff to dynamically change PWA content including pictures, text, FAQs, news articles, consent forms, survey questions, and custom dashboards for veteran cohorts. The AWA uses a separate VA SSO.
AWS Services Usage
Peraton leverages several native AWS services for the REEF SaaS platform including EC2 instances, Elastic Block Store (EBS) and S3 services; VPCs, ELBs and other network services; RDS, SES, Route53, Certificate Manager, CloudWatch; and CloudFormation templates in the CI/CD pipelines.
Third-Party Apps and Services
Peraton augmented the native AWS services with third-party products such as BigFix, Nessus, Adobe Sign, and multiple CSPs.
The Value Delivered
Peraton began this effort in September 2017 and delivered the REEF SaaS system, now called MVP Online, to the VA mid-summer of 2019. The VA officially launched MVP Online nationwide on October 4, 2019. Since it’s production deployment, MVP Online has significantly streamlined veteran enrollment and participation, allowing more than 30,000 veterans to enroll online to complete more than 16,000 baseline and 20,000 lifestyle surveys, and facilitating the request and acceptance of more than 2,000 at-home specimen collection kits. The platform has evolved into the central hub for all MVP-related activities, including research and outreach. Its growth has been driven by large-scale outreach campaigns, reaching up to 11 million veteran contacts, complemented by traditional recruitment methods. By 2023, the platform reached the milestone of 1 million veteran participants.
MVP Online SaaS successfully obtained a VA agency sponsored Authority To Operate (ATO) with Peraton as the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) providing Peraton-managed AWS GovCloud services and operations. MVP Online SaaS continues to expand and support the research program’s cohort diversification efforts, additional data collection surveys, and targeted communication campaigns to re-contact existing enrollees. Peraton delivers value solutions that accelerates the VA’s shift from paper-based to modern digital recruitment methods to accomplish program goals faster and better serve the veteran community.
Published: Feb 19, 2025