Appeal Status API
AMA introduced three new appeal options: Appeal, Higher Level Review (HLR), Supplemental Claim (SC). Collectively, these are referred to as decision reviews in Caseflow. Appeal Status API was updated to support the new decision reviews.
Appeal Status API will return the legacy appeals and decision reviews associated with the Veteran and the data describing it's state. The exception to this is remanded supplemental claims. Those are not returned as a separate claim and instead their state information is included in the original HLR or Appeal.
Remanded supplemental claims are created for an HLR when there is a DTA error and are created for an Appeal when a decision is remanded.
https://developer.va.gov/explore/appeals/docs/appeals?version=current
Describes some of the fields in the schema where the name is not self explanatory.
This checklist links to the individual issues for each field in the schema: https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow/issues/8685
This indicates if the decision review is still being worked on.
An HLR issue can have a DTA error. This will result in a remanded SC to be created by Caseflow. The HLR will remain as active (active == true) until the remanded SC is closed.
Appeals can have a remanded decision. This will result in a remanded SC to be created by Caseflow. Appeals can also have grants that need to be effectuated in VBMS, this will result in an EP being established in VBMS by Caseflow.
An Appeal will be considered active while there is still an open remanded SC or an pending effectutation EP.
Lists out the issues associated with the decision review. In Caseflow, issues are represented by RequestIssues which are the issues the Veteran is contesting in the appeal. Once the RequestIssue has a decision, that is represented as a DecisionIssue. Note: A RequestIssue can have more than one DecisionIssue.
Whether to display the RequestIssues or the DecisionIssues and whether those issues should display as active depends on the state of the decision review. HLRs and Appeals handle DTA errors/remands differently. The images below give an overview of which issues the API will return.
Image shows which issues to show for Claim Reviews (SC and HLR) Note: When an HLR has a DTA error and a remanded SC is created to track the error and resolution, the Veteran is not notified. This is why for HLR we continue to show the RequestIssues until the remanded SC is closed and at that point show the DecisionIssues.
Image show which issues to show for Appeals For Appeals, when a decision is remanded the Veteran is notified. In this case, we will show the all the DecisionIssues but show the DecisionIssue with the remand as active because there is a active remanded SC in progress to resolve it. Once the remanded SC is cleared with a decision, that DecisionIssue will replace the DecisionIssue with the remand.
In FY25Q1, the Appeal Status API was updated to send the full issue description for both RequestIssue and DecisionIssue models. Prior to this change, the models would use the diagnostic code from the record to lookup a description from the DIAGNOSTIC_CODE_DESCRIPTIONS constants file. The Board requested that this be updated to display the same text that a BVA user would see when looking at the Case Details page for an appeal. The feature toggle appeals_status_api_full_issue_description was added to allow this behavior to be reverted to the original diagnostic code lookup implementation, in case the VA.gov team required us to change back for any reason.
Controller
Serializers
Events
Alerts
BGS - Appeal Status API uses BGS to lookup the Veteran by SSN to get the filenumber. It also uses BGS to get the rating issue information.
Va.gov