[Research] User Roles Research: Discovery - existing eBenefits and MHV roles

[ajakabcin]

Project outline

As My HealtheVet and eBenefits move towards the VA.gov ecosystem, VA.gov will need to transition from serving exclusively Veterans, to serving a wider audience, such as caregivers, spouses, partners, POAs, VSOs, etc. We're conducting discovery to better understand the non-Veteran roles across VBA, VHA, and NCA, and we want to know which non-Veteran roles already exist in the VA digital ecosystem

Tasks

• [x] Identify MHV SMEs who can help us understand MHV non-veteran user roles
• [ ] Document MHV non-veteran user roles
• [x] Identify eBenefit SMEs who can help us understand MHV non-veteran user roles
• [x] Document eBenefit non-veteran user roles

[andaleliz]

@Samara-Strauss do you have any contacts for MHV that can help us understand their non-veteran user roles? For eBenefits, I'm going to start w/ the eBenefits migration team (unless there's someone else you recommend).

[Samara-Strauss]

@andaleliz I would recommend a couple things:

• If you can get into MHV staging (you need to be on the VA network), I think there's a list of user types in the profile. Idk if this actually affects any permissions on the site, but I am pretty sure that people can indicate their relationship to the VA from the MHV profile.
• Connect with Carnetta Scruggs from MHV. I can actually make that connection for you to make things easy.

[Samara-Strauss]

Connect with Carnetta Scruggs from MHV. I can actually make that connection for you to make things easy.

Email sent. We can follow-up as needed.

[andaleliz]

Sharing an update:

• I've reached out to the caregiver team thread, health care team (thread) and eBenefits migration team (thread) on Slack, as well as logged into MHV and eBenefits test accounts to see what I could learn.
• Waiting to hear back from Carnetta about MHV
• @Samara-Strauss
  • do you know anything about Human Factors Engineering? I found an eBenefits persona doc last modified by someone named Christopher Petteys who is with VHA according to the Outlook global address book. The doc lives in a Human Factors Engineering folder; I came across some other VHA persona docs created by this group. Could he be an eBenefits SME? Or that group?
  • I also found a shared email address for an eBenefits group that seems very vague and general. I could email them and see what happens.
  • What are your thoughts on reaching out to Steve Kovacs, even though he's now at OMB? He seemed quite knowledgeable about eBenefits when I interviewed him for logged in research back in May 2020.

[Samara-Strauss]

do you know anything about Human Factors Engineering? I found an eBenefits persona doc last modified by someone named Christopher Petteys who is with VHA according to the Outlook global address book.

I don't know anything about an HFE folder or a person by this name. I'm sorry :(

I also found a shared email address for an eBenefits group that seems very vague and general. I could email them and see what happens.

This probably isn't going to be super helpful. Let me ask if there are still stakeholders with eBenefits we could reach out to.

What are your thoughts on reaching out to Steve Kovacs, even though he's now at OMB? He seemed quite knowledgeable about eBenefits when I interviewed him for logged in research back in May 2020.

If we can't figure this out, I'll ask Steve. IMO he should have never been allowed to leave 😆

[Samara-Strauss]

Via an OCTO-only Slack channel from Charles:

there is a "VSO-facing" part of eBenefits called "stakeholder enterprise portal"

I don't know more than this, but this is helpful to know!

Matt Self said I should reach out to Mike Walker, who works on EVSS. I'm going to try that to see if he has any insight. Also reaching out to Melissa Rebstock. I'll let you know if/when I hear back.

[Samara-Strauss]

Some helpful insight from Mike Walker (EVSS) re: eBenefits roles:

I can certainly help and the answer is yes, eBenefits has two basic roles we support – Veterans, and Dependents of Veterans (e.g. spouse/family member.)

The vast majority of our features are targeted at Veterans, but there are certain things we offer to Dependent as well – for example, we have special letters that a Dependent can print associated with Benefits that apply not just to the Veteran but to other family members as well.

Currently for eBenefits this is all tied to the DS Logon credential which actually includes embedded information that tells us if the user is a dependent, and in that case who the associated Veteran they are linked to. There is currently a move underway to implement a credential-agnostic replacement for this using MPI (MVI) and BGS data. I anticipate that will take several months (or more) but eventually the VA should have an option for identify this role which is not tied to DMDC/DS Logon.

Melissa Rebstock (VBA/VEO/also worked on eBenefits) had this to say via a Teams chat:

I believe what they [users] see on eBenefits is based on their DS Logon. If they're a dependent, they do not see all the features available to a Veteran. We didn't classify specific user roles as we did what features they had access too. For example, a surviving spouse could see claim status summary information but not details. They also could not access My Documents b/c of Veteran specific information.

That's it. We didn't go any further into development for non-Veteran users. SEP [Stakeholder Enterprise Portal] supports VSOs, Private Attorneys and Claim Agents. SEP was supposed to be a 3rd party support application, but never got developed beyond those three groups.

We're looking to migrate the functionality to VA.gov. I was working with Cory Trimm on non-Veteran access to VA.gov. Also working with Dror and Lighthouse on best way to move SEP. He's working on backend services and I owe him some metric information.

So, TL;DR is this:

It sounds like there are two roles on eBenefits -- veteran and a broad dependent role, which can include family members/caregivers that receive benefits. There is also a separate platform called SEP (first I've heard of it) that caters to VSOs and other non-familial or caregiver representatives.

[Samara-Strauss]

Laurie Baker (VBA/VEO/works with Melissa) can also serve as a stakeholder on this from a technical perspective. She has been working with Melissa/Cory Trimm (our team) on drafting requirements on non-Veteran beneficiary access for MPI/BGS/Corp DB.

[andaleliz]

Thanks for gathering this information Samara! So helpful. Hopefully Carnetta will come through with the MHV equivalent.

Laurie Baker (VBA/VEO/works with Melissa) can also serve as a stakeholder on this from a technical perspective.

Is the this in that sentence specific to eBenefits, or you mean the whole non-Veteran user role initiative?

[Samara-Strauss]

Melissa said Laurie is involved in what technical requirements might look like for non-veteran beneficiaries (so, I think that means dependents/family/caregivers). It doesn't sound like that's specific to eBenefits, but Idk if she has a broad perspective on all non-veteran roles or just non-veteran beneficiaries.

[Samara-Strauss]

My summary of what the dependent role looks like on eBenefits via our convo with Mike Walker and Mahesh Raparthi:

• Dependents can see most features in eBenefits, except the ability to file a disability claim, dependent claim, or the documents feature.
• However, most features are read-only, which means that eBenefits loads information for dependents if it exists in the VA databases connected to eBenefits.
• Dependents can access benefit letters that are specific to them.

[andaleliz]

Hey @Samara-Strauss, have you heard from Carnetta at all? I assume she'd "reply all" but thought I would double check. I got a few other MHV contacts via the VAOS team I can reach out to - Rich Beaudoin, Bryan Riley (PM) and Arienne Walters (UX lead) if we don't hear from Carnetta.

[Samara-Strauss]

I haven't heard from her via email. Let me reach out via Teams and see if I get a response.

[Samara-Strauss]

This is from Arienne Walters via Slack:

This is an area we are trying to understand more as well. From what we do know, based on discussions with Carnetta, business, and MHV Devs, we are going to start pulling that data from MPI when user accounts are ‘matched’ in the backend. There are some checkbox fields that might not be available from MPI, so I think the plan is to keep those.

Someone (I think Gary Howard), told us that the field “CHAMPVA…” would give them more access to MHV, as if they were a premium user. However, it would have to ping the backend to make sure they really are CHAMPVA. - If we are going to pull from MPI, there seems to be no need to have that now, since it has to ping the backend anyway.

The only other information we have, is that coordinators and helpdesk staff use the relationship values to understand the person they are trying to help more.

So, from what I gather, it sounds like those user types listed on MHV under "What is your relationship to the VA?" likely don't do anything now, maybe with the exception of the CHAMPVA field, but if it does, CHAMPVA status first needs to be confirmed on the backend. Otherwise, this info is used by MHV coordinators so they know how to help people with issues that come up.

[andaleliz]

• I think we're good to go with eBenefits
• I've updated the findings doc accordingly, with eBenefits and MHV info that we have
• @Samara-Strauss was able to schedule a meeting with Carnetta for 11/1 🎉
• Created #31711 to capture the outstanding work to better understand how user roles impact MHV functionality, which will be completed in the next sprint pending our 11/1 meeting. (FYI @ajakabcin)