Editing AMA issues - department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow GitHub Wiki

Overview

Before the Appeals Modernization Act (AMA) went into effect, the Caseflow-Queue team was tasked with researching, designing, and implementing a process for attorneys and judges to log decisions on AMA cases. We started this work in June 2018. We piloted the new AMA issues process with a small group of attorneys and judges in early February 2019. On February 19, 2019, all attorneys and judges who had RAMP or AMA cases assigned to them were using the functionality.

Resource

In depth presentation about issues and how AMA affects them.

Purpose

Or, why we designed a new interface and process for issues on AMA cases.

Before AMA went into effect, attorneys and judges (along with other pilot groups of BVA employees) worked legacy cases in Caseflow. Caseflow was/is also backwards compatible with the issues that are listed in VACOLS. Any modifications that were made to issues in VACOLS would result in modifications to the issues listed in Caseflow. While this gave attorneys and judges a great level of flexibility in adding, removing, or changing the wording of issues on appeal, the "VACOLS-way" doesn't allow BVA or Congress to track issues in any meaningful way. Under section 5 of the Appeals Modernization Act, Congress needs to track different appeals processing metrics. Caseflow was designed to support those metrics.

How we got started

With this section of the law top of mind, we started our work. A few of our main considerations were:

  • BVA Decisions that attorneys and judges log in Caseflow need to be connected to a previous VBA claim decision
  • If attorneys want to add an issue to an appeal to better reflect what the Veteran is appealing (also known as "attorney magic), those issues also need to be connected to a previous VBA claim decision

The Caseflow Intake tool is the front door for all decision reviews. We worked closely with the Caseflow-Intake team to understand how Veterans requested a decision review, how their appeal was written on the NOD form, how the Intake staff would accurately select the issues on appeal, and what the case would look like when it finally landed with an attorney. It was important for us to understand the "journey of an issue" from person to person and system to system.

Goals

Or, what Caseflow needed to support.

  1. Attorneys and judges need the ability to correct clerical errors. Or, when the Intake user makes a mistake when selecting the issues the Veteran is appealing in the Intake too.
  2. Attorneys and judges need the flexibility to modify the wording of issues or add new issues ("attorney magic") to an appeal to best reflect what the Veteran is appealing.
  3. On rarer occurrences, attorneys and judges need to add the same decision to multiple issues on appeal if they feel that the issues warrant one decision rather than separate decisions.
  4. Require all Caseflow users to link BVA decisions (including additional decision issues) to prior VA decisions so that we can track the journey of an issue from its inception. And, we need to adhere to section 5 reporting requirements.
  5. If an Intake user doesn't understand what the Veteran is appealing, they can mark it as an "unknown issue" for an attorney or judge to review. Attorneys and judges needs the ability to select the correct issue on appeal when unknown issues are present.

Who was involved

  • The Intake team designed and developed functionality for correcting the issues on appeal
  • The Queue team designed and developed the UI that attorneys and judges see when viewing issues on the Case Details page and adding decision issues to a case.

User Stories

This is the epic ticket for this work (where we developed user stories and discussed thew work). Once our user stories were final, we translated them into separate tickets for the engineering team:

  1. Viewing issues in Case Details
  2. Adding decision issues to a case: Part 1 and part 2
  3. Editing/remove decision issues
  4. Correcting clerical errors from Intake

Current status

We finished our initial design and development work. After attorneys had been using the functionality for a month, we set up three observation and feedback sessions to understand how the process was going for them and what could be improved. To view insights and next steps from those follow-up sessions, search "AMA Issues Feedback Sessions" in Mural.

As an immediate follow up from this session, we updated the UI that attorneys/judges use to add or edit decision issues. Our goal was to quickly address usability concerns. See #9561 for our latest recommendation.

We are also working on displaying how withdrawn, removed, or stayed issues are displayed on AMA cases in Caseflow. #8936 contains discussion and latest design proposals. The collective list of issue dispositions we need to accommodate for decision issues are: Allowed, denied, remanded, vacated. For request issues, we need to accommodate the following states: Stayed, withdrawn, dismissed (matter of law), dismissed (death).

Potential risks

After AMA went into effect, we did a light audit of all completed AMA cases. We compared the BVA decision letter with what the attorney/judge logged in Caseflow to understand how they were using the functionality we built and designed. We noticed a few things:

  1. Some attorneys/judges were using abbreviations in decision issues in Caseflow (ex: SC for RN is denied), which is only understandable by BVA attorneys.
  2. Some attorneys mistakenly added the same decision to multiple issues when they didn't intend to. During our follow up sessions, the three attorneys we met with couldn't explain what this feature did, so it's likely that the use case for it isn't understood.

Caseflow can better guide and support attorneys and judges as they log decisions and complete a case. We've addressed abbreviations by adding instructional text that tells attorneys to copy and paste the order from their BVA decision letter. To maintain the integrity of Caseflow metrics, we need to re-visit the designs for adding the same decision to multiple issues so that attorneys don't select issues by mistake. Currently, a multi-step process lives in a singular modal. One path forward could be ditching the modal and presenting each step on separate screens, making it clear that the last step is optional. More investigation and data analysis should be done to understand if this is a widespread usability issue.

Below is the current modal design, or the mechanism by which attorneys can log their decision on any particular issue on a case: Current modal design, for reference.

More resources

To learn more about definitions, different user flows, scenarios we outlined when we first started this work in June, see this Mural

To view the progression of our research, usability testing synthesis, and design, see this Mural room.

Adding request issues

Adding request issues to a decision review is a multi-step process that makes a number of connections on the back end. The user's process for adding an issue includes:

  • Selecting a contestable issue
  • If the issue is not listed, adding either a new nonrating issue or unidentified issue
  • If the issue is not timely, entering whether there was an exemption
  • Connecting the request issue to a matching VACOLs issue if it exists

During this process, Caseflow also:

  • Connects the request issue to the contestable issue (a rating issue, or a prior Caseflow decision)
  • Validates the issue
  • Closes the legacy issues and legacy appeal if they were opted into AMA
  • Creates a contention in VBMS, which special issues if needed. These contentions get associated to rating issues.