Change request: give Veterans the ability to download additional claim development letters

[amylai-va]

1.) Requestor's Name

Amy Lai

2.) Requestor's Email

[email protected]

3.) VA Team

OCTO Benefits - Claims Status Tool (CST)

4.) What is the name of the project or change?

Make claim development letters available in CST

5.) Please explain what problem you are trying to solve.

During the claims process, VA will send Veterans "development letters" or other correspondence by mail for a variety of reasons -- e.g., to request evidence or information, to inform the Veteran that a medical exam has been scheduled, etc. Because these letters are sent by mail, it can take days or weeks before a Veteran receives the letter and can respond to it, which directly contributes to long claim processing times.

6.) Please explain how this change would work.

VBA would like to add five (potentially seven) development letters to the claim letters page in the Claim Status Tool (CST) to reduce the amount of time it takes to gather evidence to process claims. By making the letter available digitally and by making VA's request to Veterans clear, we believe that Veterans will able to respond to VA requests faster and submit stronger evidence.

A few notes:

• The VA.gov team is planning the release in phases. First, we will make the letters available for download. Then, we will improve how we describe the requests/tracked items that are associated with these letters.
• Email or text notifications is out of scope for this request
• As part of this work, we also want to learn which letters the mobile app currently delivers to ensure we're not delivering any that VBA does not intend to deliver.

7.) Features Impacted

Claim letters download (where Veterans currently download "Notification Letters")

8.) Please include all relevant documentation links for this change request.

Link to claim letter types

• Column C (Status) shows the letters that need to be added to CST
• Column H (draft short name) is what we'll be calling the letters in the initial release. A few letter codes will use the same display name. These may need adjustment for mobile.

Design options

• We're going with a version of "claim letters var 7" on va.gov

9.) Does your team have all the necessary materials (documents, designs, processes, analytics, APIs, etc) in place for Mobile to make these changes right now?

Mobile designs will be needed

10.) Has this change been discussed with VAHB POs (Rachel, Ryan, or Don)?

Yes, Ryan

11.) Has this change been agreed upon by all impacted VA Stakeholders?

Yes, OCTO + VBA

12.) What is your ideal due date for this change request?

within 1-2 months of VA.gov's launch, which is planned for the end of September 2024

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[rtwell]

some notes / follow up

1. an audit of letters currently displayed in the app so all teams have a single source of truth to align. cc @ala-yna
2. @amylai-va regarding 9, who will need to provide the design work?
3. in the benefits section of the app, there is a section under Claims called Claims Letters. There is also a section in benefits called VA Letters and Documents. Will these letters live in both places? one or the other? What is the difference between these two similar but different sections? cc @ala-yna
4. Are we using existing API to get these letters or is there a new one? @amylai-va @CorySohrakoffUSDS

[amylai-va]

2. It'd be great if @jstrothman could shadow or pair with a mobile designer on the designs.
3. These would live on the Claim Letters page. The Claim Letters page shows claim-related correspondence that VA sends Veterans by mail. The VA Letter and Documents contains verification letters provided by VA that Veterans can generate to obtain additional benefits and services.
4. To my knowledge, existing API. We're just adding additional letter codes.

[amylai-va]

Hey @rtwell! Here with an update and a few questions:

Update:

• As of today, we have released the 7 additional development letters to 50% of users.
• If no issues arise, we expect to be at 100% on Monday 9/30.

Questions:

• Do you have an estimate for when the mobile team will be able to complete an audit of all claim letters currently displayed in the app?
• Same question about when the mobile designers will be able to begin pairing with @jstrothman on the mobile design of this feature?
• Would it make sense for us Julie, Cory, and I to attend mobile's sprint review or another ceremony to stay updated on benefits-related mobile work?

[ala-yna]

Hi Amy! I can help with one of those questions. I created this ticket to have someone on the team look at what letter types are available within the app. He pointed me back to the Slack conversation we had back in July. TLDR, this might be more of a backend question - we can show whatever letters are provided by the upstream service.

[9/27 update] - as noted in the #9584, we want to the following doctypes to mobile, with different display names to aid user recognition:

34 Correspondence
408 VA Examination Letter
700 MAP-D Development Letter
859 Subsequent Development Letter
942 Final Attempt Letter
864 General Records Request (Medical)
1605 General Records Request (Non-Medical)
704, 706, and 858 for the 5103s

[jstrothman]

Thank you @ala-yna
Some notes I pull from the 7/3/2024 Slack thread:

1. Mobile only shows doctype 184: Notification Letter (e.g. VA 20-8993, VA 21-0290, PCGL)
2. Mobile can also show doctype 27, but that is currently disabled.
   • JS note: This is what we'd expect. These are Board Appeal decisions and not yet approved for release by BVA)
3. @Sparowhawk noted: Since we don’t do any filtering on the phone or any filtering in the mobile api BE and it’s all done upstream as long as it’s added to the list for us we will display it. The only consideration that needs to happen is to make sure the claim letter has the decision letter sent flag flipped to true in the api/upstream so we can know to send them to the decision letter list to view it, otherwise we just tell them we(VA) mailed them a letter.
   • JS note: We want to include more than decision letters. (List of doctypes to add is in the claim letter types spreadsheet linked from issue description)

[rtwell]

pending confirmation of the list of doctypes to be included in #9584 I'm unclear who is responsible to implement it (Exp team or mobile app team)—based on the comment from @Sparowhawk it seems like this could/should be done in the API.

[rtwell]

@amylai-va

Same question about when the mobile designers will be able to begin pairing with @jstrothman on the mobile design of this feature?

I'm unclear what design work needs to happen—if all we're doing is updating the API to include more letters, it seems like we have the functionality in place to display them.

Can you all take a crack at a first pass at breaking down this work and identifying where you need support? this be a huge help for us to gauge how much time and effort, prioritizing, etc. Here is a link to our Figma files if that helps get you started from a design perspective.

Would it make sense for us Julie, Cory, and I to attend mobile's sprint review or another ceremony to stay updated on benefits-related mobile work?

Once we have the work represented as user stories/tickets in GH, you'll be able to track the work as it moves across our board.

[jstrothman]

@rtwell Re the work that needs to happen: The names of the letters that come in through the API are not plain language.
On web, we special case the display name based on doc type of the letter. The names we use on web may be longer than appropriate for mobile -- identifying the names to use to display these letters is the work that needs to happen.
This letter download codes and names spreadsheet (SharePoint) includes columns for:

1. VBMS name
2. Web display name

As well as a scratchpad sheet for iterating on the display names.

[rtwell]

great—what is the actual design work that needs to happen that the app currently doesn't have an affordance for now? without seeing anything, I'm assuming we're adding a line of type or maybe a label…? is the problem something like "oh wow normally I see a list of 5 letters but now I see a list of 18 letters and I cannot tell them apart"? or is it simply adding a plain language name to the list view? so do we need a new thing in the app that isn't there now (eg a label) or is it just adding/changing words? Does that help? sorry not trying to get too in the weeds, just trying to have a clear understanding of the work itself.

[jstrothman]

@rtwell The current need is adding/changing words.
We expect to address the issue of unmanageable number of letters which impedes findability. The web team plans to consider some filters, and I'm waiting on distribution data from VBA (distribution of number of letters per claim and distribution of number of open claims per Veteran) in order to assess the need for filters. We think this will be more necessary when we add even more letters.
We have a key obstacle to useful filters: The API provides no mechanism to associate a letter with a specific claim, making date and letter type the only available organizing metadata.

[jstrothman]

@ala-yna After discussing w/Ryan, I don't think mock-ups of the Claim Letters additions and adjustments are necessary.
The following table describes the letters that should show in VAHB Claim Letters and how they should be named in the UI:

Doctype	VBMS name	Display name	When added to web
34	Correspondence	Request for specific evidence or information	09/2024
408	VA Examination Letter	Notification: Exam with VHA has been scheduled	09/2024
700	MAP-D Development Letter	Request for specific evidence or information	09/2024
859	Subsequent Development Letter	Request for specific evidence or information	09/2024
942	Final Attempt Letter	Final notification: Request for specific evidence or information	09/2024
864	General Records Request (Medical)	Copy of request for medical records sent to a non-VA provider	09/2024
1605	General Records Request (Non-Medical)	Copy of request for non-medical records sent to a non-VA organization	09/2024
184	Decision Notices	Claim decision (or other notification, like Intent to File)	02/2023
704	5103	List of evidence we may need ("5103 notice")	03/2024
706	5103	List of evidence we may need ("5103 notice")	03/2024
858	5103	List of evidence we may need ("5103 notice")	03/2024

I think "VBMS name" is what comes in from the Letters endpoint.

[jstrothman]

@DonMcCaugheyUSDS Are the claim letters naming something we should be looking into storing such that they can be referenced by both web and mobile?

[CorySohrakoffUSDS]

@DonMcCaugheyUSDS This appears be a good candidate for a common backend solution like #9671 since the display name would be the same as web.

[DonMcCaugheyUSDS]

@jstrothman @CorySohrakoffUSDS Yes, we should build common business logic that is shared by web and mobile API endpoints. I believe that there is currently some code duplicated between mobile and web than can be unified.

[jstrothman]

@iandonovan For staging [email protected], I see a letter labeled Board decision
We should be suppressing Board decisions (doctype: 27) — we have code in place that delays including the letter, but also should have code in place suppressing them entirely because the Board hasn't approved digital delivery.

This CST - letter download codes and names spreadsheet is the source of truth for the doctypes we should be delivering, as well as display names.

I also tested with [email protected]
These users claim letter names look correct on web.

I'd love to be able to see screenshots of what this looks like on mobile. I haven't been able to see what the long letter names will look like for readability and scannability purposes. Is that something you can provide from your testing — perhaps for either of these test users?

[iandonovan]

@jstrothman Thank you so much!

So right away, I've gone ahead and re-disabled the feature flag that shows BoA letters. Those should now be removed from Staging (and were never enabled on Production).

The names I've implemented match that spreadsheet, which is great! I asked because some words weren't capitalized, that sort of thing -- wanted to confirm we wanted them in there 1:1.

As for mobile testing, I will take a look at things and get back to you! I agree that some of the longer names may be a little cumbersome, but there's only one way to know for sure.

[iandonovan]

@jstrothman Here is a screenshot from user+236's claims letters now that I have removed Doctype 27:

This is not the longest letter name, but I think it shows the behavior. The name wraps to the second line. To me, it reads well!

[amylai-va]

QA discussion happening in this thread, awaiting QA sign off: https://dsva.slack.com/archives/C018V2JCWRJ/p1733417588476029