The Hearings Management Branch at the Board can hold hearings at 55 different regional offices. There is at least one in almost every state, and more than one in California, Pennsylvania, New York, and Texas. Caseflow conducts a process known as "geomatching" to match appeals with the regional office that's closest to the appellant (within state lines) and provide coordinators with a list of available hearing locations for Video hearings.

Geomatching to regional offices

Caseflow geomatches by sending a VA.gov service the appellant's address and a list of potential facility IDs in the same state. That service returns the driving distances between the address and the provided facilities. Caseflow matches the appeal to the regional office queue for the facility from that list that's closest to the address and will show the appeal in the Veterans Waiting tab of the Schedule Veterans page when that regional office is selected.

Available hearing locations

Each regional office has a list of alternate hearing locations, also known as "satellite offices", that they are also able to send an appellant to for a hearing. Distances to the appellant's assigned regional office and its alternate locations are stored in the database and used to populate the hearing locations dropdown when scheduling a Video hearing. If available hearing locations are not stored prior to a coordinator attempting to schedule a hearing, the appeal is geomatched in real time.

Notes

• Alternate hearing locations are not considered when geo-matching.
  • The only exceptions are for:
    • Veterans whose closest hearing location is San Antonio. They will be geo-matched to the Houston regional office queue, even if Waco is closer (#9858)
    • Veterans whose closest hearing location is El Paso. They will be geo-matched to the Waco regional office.
• Only Veterans that have requested a Central Office hearing will be geo-matched to the Central Office (#15415).
• Any appeal with a hearing request type of "Virtual" will appear in the Veterans Waiting tabs for "Virtual Hearings" and their closest regional office.
• Veterans with an address in the Philippines will be geo-matched to the Manila regional office.
• Geo-matching across state lines was introduced in August 2019 (#11063) and was stopped in July 2020 (#14519).
• Prior to AMA, a Veteran would be assigned to whatever regional office they initially filed their paperwork with. This is the bfregoff column on a VACOLS::Case.
• Geo-matching for foreign appeals outside of Philippines will be automatically geo-matched to the Pittsburgh regional office

Timing, jobs, and tasks

The FindHearingLocationsForVeteransJob is scheduled hourly and uses two external services to geomatch appeals with an open ScheduleHearingTask: Vet360 for geocoding the Veteran's address and VA Facilities API to find the driving distance to facilities. If we are unable to geocode an appellant's address, then we will manually validate with the zip code instead.

Distances between the appellant address and the list of facilities are stored in the available_hearing_locations table, which is used to populate the hearing locations dropdown when scheduling a Video hearing.

Other relevant code

• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow/blob/master/app/jobs/hearings/geomatch_and_cache_appeal_job.rb
• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow/blob/master/app/services/geomatch_service.rb
• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow/blob/master/app/services/va_dot_gov_address_validator.rb