Google's NotebookLM
Hopefully this can help others with complex claims. I am working on a very medically complex claim (presumptive bile duct cancer over eight years ago, two major surgeries with secondaries and some ortho issues). I have well over 8,000 pages of medical records from five different medical institutions including the VA. Sorting through all of that would be impossible manually (I tried and I failed miserably). First, I "blew up" free Gemini by feeding it too much and eventually running out of tokens, it just started to either hallucinate badly or simply threw an error and "forgot" the whole thread. Then I found Google's AI Studio (2 million tokens for free) but was kind of stopped on that because I could only upload so many documents and there was no real way to organize them.
I finally stumbled onto Google's NotebookLM (https://notebooklm.google.com/, also free). You can upload up to 50 sources per notebook (you can have multiple notebooks) and have it find things in your records that you would never be able to find manually, given the right prompts. I uploaded ALL of my medical records into one notebook (one of the files had to be split up into multiple 500 page PDF sections to get around the size issue) and used that to farm the specific "gems" I would need to include in a claim. I extracted those records as separate PDFs and organized them into combined PDFs on my macBook using Preview for each part of my claim. I then created another notebook that has all of these combined PDFs (claim support, military records, and then medical records matching the areas I'm claiming). On that notebook I am able to prompt about claim structure and organization and whether I need to go farm some more information from the first notebook to include in the claim. After including all of the suggested supporting medical and other documentation it does a pretty decent job of analyzing the quality of your claim material and will make suggestions to strengthen it if necessary. It does pretty good with both medical and VA language as it is "pre-trained" on public information on the Internet.
It can also estimate the ratings that might be expected, with the right prompt. Of course that is JUST an estimate and you should take it with a grain of salt.
I'm no expert, I've never filed before and I retired in '97. I had no reason to really file until the VA exposure clinic told me that bile duct cancer is presumptive and that I probably had a claim. I have a large personal statement, a couple of nexus letters from surgeons I'm seeing, several lay statements, military records like jump logs and hazardous duty orders, and all of these medical records. Remains to be seen what the VA comes back with.
But, I would not have been able to do this without the help of this tool, so I thought I would post this in the event it might help someone else organize their claim. As always there are no guarantees but the organization aspect of this tool is amazing. Hope this is able to help someone.
As always, make sure you redact before you upload.