Evaluate onsite notifications for Appointment Cancellations

[A6-toma]

User Story

As a Cartography team member, I need to understand ux and technical limitations around appointment cancellations so that I can better understand the needs for how notifications about appointment cancellations may need to be displayed on the MyHealtheVet landing page.

Description

Evaluate onsite notifications for Appointment Cancellations. Kay Lawyer is Appointments SME. See related ticket about evaluating appointment reminders #59623.

Related Artifacts:

• Appointments team Mural: "current state" (as of early this year) service map of appointment notifications
• Results of research study related to service map

Tasks

• [x] Sync with appointments team (Peter Russo, Kristen McConnell, Kay Lawyer) to get more information about appointments notifications current state
• [ ] UX evaluation
  • Determine whether both patients (Veterans) & providers (VA) can cancel appointments. In which cases? How are these indicated to end-users?
• [ ] Technical evaluation
  • Where can we learn more about technical infrastructure supporting appointment cancellations currently?
  • Through what modes are Veterans notified about appointment cancellations?

Acceptance Criteria

• [ ] UX complexity and technical complexity of implementing Appointment Cancellation onsite notification have been documented.

[A6-toma]

Hey team! Please add your planning poker estimate with Zenhub @AngelaFowler82 @carafrissell1 @carlosfelix2 @ericvoshall @fmccaf1 @jonathanjnelson @keithcheung828

[sterkenburgsara]

@keithcheung828 can I add you as an assignee along with me on this one to work through together since you have a similar other ticket?

[keithcheung828]

@sterkenburgsara Yes please

[sterkenburgsara]

Update: @keithcheung828 and I synced with the Appointments team on 8/10/23 and learned that there is a lot of complexity associated with appointment notifications. The team has mapped out a lot of work (Jenny Wang will share that with us soon). Peter also shared this mural (also linked in "related artifacts" section above) and findings from a related research study.

Information about current state of notifications:

• If appointments are cancelled by the VA more than 30 days out, they send a paper notice to the Veteran in the mail. If it is less than 30 days out, they send an email (I think this is what they told us? Will verify with Jenny's data once we get that)

• The biggest problem is appointment cancellations on the same day (if a doctor is sick and has to call in) - triage health support staff analyzes the doctor's patient roster for the day and determines if some of those appointments can be routed to another physician or to a telehealth appointment before determining which ones need to be cancelled. But by the time this takes place, sometimes Veterans are already at the facility when they find out their appointment was cancelled. Some other method like push-notifications on mobile devices or via the mobile app could help relieve this problem.

• Kristen said appointments is going through a big shift and we should focus on what is currently actionable. We are sorting through this. But appointments may not be the easiest notifications work to take on next (after Secure Messaging).

@keithcheung828 what else? I'm sure I missed some things that we should document.

[keithcheung828]

@sterkenburgsara Veteran can only cancel and it requires Veteran to schedule a new appointment for any changes. Schedule modification is not available. In addition, in some cases, pending appointment can also be canceled by Veteran but we are not sure if it falls under the cases of pending or cancellation while VA staff takes time to process the cancelation request.