Deeper technical investigation into Flashes + Special Issues

[mackhowell-nava]

Opportunity brief here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jV9ZKV80kLzVd3fodUFeoqsJkiLO7-MU0I-VkitHQw0/edit?usp=sharing

High-level Goal

To understand which special issues and flashes are attempting to be set and whether that logic is functioning correctly.

Description

Following up on @nanotone's initial research on Flashes: https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/abd-vro/issues/3452, we'd like to understand more about the Special Issues side of the equation. For some additional context here, David K indicated that "...additional Special Issues that are currently applied in va.gov claims will no longer be applied when the transition from EVSS to Lighthouse is completed."

Acceptance Criteria

1. Briefly research what we know/can discover about how special issues move through the system (duplicate research but for special issues)
2. Summarize below in a comment
3. Anything else we think of doing now to get us closer to the above goal? See the Discovery section of the brief.

[nanotone]

Technical discovery on how special issues are applied by va.gov's 526 form:

Basic background - special issues are tags that can be added to contentions, signifying some special handling downstream regarding either the contention or the claim as a whole.

Note: Outside of flashes at the Veteran level, and special issues at the contention level, there is no mechanism to tag a claim as a whole, which is why claim-level tags (like EMP for EP400 Merge) are implemented as special issues.

Many learnings are indebted to prior discovery done by the DBEX team.

• On a Form526Submission, vets-api can add special issues to a contention by including a specialIssues array on the disability object.
  • These are initially populated by special issues sent from the frontend, which must be in this list in the JSON spec. Currently, POW is the only such example.
  • The vets-api backend can add special issues of its own. Currently, EMP is the only such example.
• EVSS, which is currently the middleware between vets-api and VBMS that actually establishes claims, imposes its own list of allowed special issues: ALS, GWPAH, HEPC, POW, PTSD_1, PTSD_2, PTSD_4, PTSD_3, RRD, PACT, EMP (as of March '24). Turn-around time to make changes to this logic is on the order of weeks.
• Lighthouse's Benefits Claims API is slated to replace EVSS imminently, and plans to support both POW and EMP in v2. Turn-around time to make changes to this logic is also on the order of weeks. Additionally, there appears to be little/no intention to let API consumers (e.g. vets-api) specify arbitrarily many special issue types.