caseflow

Good evening, I have to assume that VA department you're talking about is Dept of Veterans Affairs - and if that's the case, you're in luck! You don't have to wait till 2150 for this to happen. I know that we no longer process injury claims on paper probably since 2014 or so. Most of the paperwork filed are shipped, scanned, and processed into digitized forms into a system of record known as Veterans Benefit Management System (VBMS) here at the VA. VA Regional Office staffers can then pull the digital records for further processing. I supported the VBMS team's effort in migrating to a cloud based environment in 2017/2018 and my team help start the Caseflow/Appeals project, a system used to track appeals cases - which relies on VBMS daily. Caseflow is open source as well. https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow

These plays can work. Why? Because USDS employees are government employees with escalation paths all the way up to the very top which gives them a lot of power to break down bureaucratic barriers to modern software development that government contractors & consultants would have no chance of doing. They then can bring in contractors to work in the relatively modern shell that they've created. For example, here's a project started by the USDS in 2015. It's responsible for managing the complex bureaucratic process of VA legal appeals. (https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow) It's open source, continuously integrated and deployed with close to 100% test coverage, deployed on an AWS GovCloud VPC, and was built on a fraction of the budget of similar systems. Active development on this system is now done primarily by contrac

There are review and approval steps that my agency requires, but aren’t part of the workflow in the system, so I have to remember who needs to see what, whether they’ve responded, etc. The VA has a solution for you: https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow

You are dead on. We do have a bug where we are not recovering the Oracle connectivity correctly. It is on our radar to address the issue. https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow-m... However, There is actually another 50% of the story that I never posted. VACOLS is a really old Oracle DB (from the 80s) that is out of our control. Somehow, it has a "feature" where you can only make one TCP connection to it every 2-3 second. So if we lose connection to the database, it will take many seconds to recover. At that point, our ELB health-check would've fired and restarted our EC2 instances. This is why recoverability of the database connection is not an immediate priority. Here's how we preallocate the VACOLS connection pool to workaround this throttling feature. https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow/b...