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Virtual Regional Office Platform Outline

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Erik Nelsestuen edited this page Aug 24, 2024 · 1 revision

Overview

The Virtual Regional Office (VRO) is a suite of products that contribute to making disability benefits claims submitted on va.gov maximally actionable and minimally burdensome for claims adjudicators, resulting in faster and more accurate claim processing and shorter wait times for Veterans to get a decision on their claims.

Within the VRO ecosystem, the VRO platform supports the teams building these products, by providing them with the data, systems access, authority, and infrastructure needed to quickly and effectively develop new product hypotheses.

Outcome Summary

Our Mission: The VRO platform exists to provide an environment where it's easy to build software to improve the VA's internal claims process.

Our Vision: Teams on the platform have access to shared knowledge, processes, and tools, allowing them to quickly build and validate ideas that improve the VA's internal claims process. As a platform team, our success is measured by time-to-value for our partners, ie. the product teams building and iterating on applications in VRO.

Related/Associated product(s)

The VRO platform team (#benefits-vro) currently supports these application teams:

Problem

No place to build and test ideas to improve VA's internal claims process

As the OCTO Benefits Portfolio increases its efforts to impact the end-to-end disability benefits lifecycle beyond the Veteran-facing services provided on va.gov, teams with ideas to improve aspects of the VA's internal (employee-facing) claims process have not had a go-to place to quickly build and test those ideas. Prototypes could be shoe-horned into existing codebases, but would not have a chance to scale there.

  • VRO provides a dedicated space for these product opportunities, tailored to the needs of claims processing tools

Claims data visibility

Getting claims-related data often requires formalized data requests that can take weeks and still return the wrong information. In addition, teams need deep knowledge of the domain to frame a request properly, which dissuades teams from utilizing data for crucial decisions.

Coordination cost of integrating with VA systems

Claims processing tools rely heavily on interactions with multiple VA systems to retrieve and update relevant claims data. Integrating with these systems often requires extensive coordination across different parts of the organization with different ways of working, as well as navigating the technical and operational complexity of the given system – draining time and energy that could otherwise be put into accelerated product development.

  • Products within the VRO product suite benefit from system integrations implemented and maintained by the VRO platform team, and made available to the product suite as microservices, including fully documented helper libraries to reduce developer discovery burden

Support for rapid, iterative product experimentation

Most OIT teams aren’t currently set up to support rapid software delivery to production in weeks, due to prescheduled six-week cycles. Even when the software is developed, it takes months to get approval to go to production.

  • The VRO platform provides a software development environment for partner product teams to deploy to the VA's Lighthouse Delivery Infrastructure (LHDI) platform, including build utilities, DevOps support, and ATO support.
  • The platform team provides processes and tools for releasing software in VRO, documentation & code from past experiments, best practices, and libraries for development, design, and research. Teams will be able to learn from & leverage the work others have done in the benefits space.

Desired Outcomes

  • Teams building applications in the VRO product suite can deploy an MVP to production in weeks, not months
  • Teams testing product ideas in VRO have the data they need to validate or invalidate their hypotheses in days or weeks, not months

Undesired Outcomes

  • Teams on the VRO platform take longer to validate ideas than if they were to use another platform.
  • Teams building on VRO independently work on redundant or duplicative efforts

Measuring Success

Current Objectives

Objective: Continue to mature the platform to support partner teams

  • Key Result: By December 31, 2023, VRO partner teams will have the ability to perform daily automated deployments to production, independent of the platform team.

Objective: Build Claims Data Visibility

  • Key Results:
    • By Oct 2023, VRO will have visibility to real time and historical contention history for all claims submitted.
    • By December 31, 2023, VRO will have visibility to all disability benefit form data submitted on VA.gov

Objective: Support the priorities of all teams on the claims fast tracking crew.

  • Key Result: By December 2023 at least 40% of partners indicate that they would be very disappointed if VRO were no longer available to them.
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