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Virtual Regional Office Overview

The Virtual Regional Office (VRO) platform is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, hosted on the VA's Lighthouse Delivery Infrastructure (LHDI) platform. It is managed and maintained by the VA's OCTO Benefits Crew. Initially, the project had a very different objective when it was formed for the Rapid Ready Decisions (RRD) project. However, the original idea was re-evaluated, leading to the creation of the new vision for the VRO platform.

"The VRO platform provides teams with access to shared knowledge, processes, and tools, enabling them to quickly build and validate ideas that improve the VA's internal claims process".

As a platform team, our success is measured by the time-to-value for our partners—the product teams developing and iterating on applications within VRO. At its core, VRO is an ecosystem of services hosted on AWS Managed Kubernetes clusters offered by LHDI. Please refer to our architectural diagram below for a technical overview

Our Value Proposition

cATO: VRO maintains the continuous Authority to Operate (cATO), so our partner teams do not need to obtain one themselves, significantly reducing the time to market for new applications. Build on us and cut the line!

Standardized Deployment Processes: VRO solves the problem of fragmented deployment practices by providing a standardized process for continuous integration (CI) tests and deployments, ensuring consistency and efficiency.

Intermediary Flexibility: VRO acts as a bridge between LHDI and their services, so our partner teams do not have to handle these complexities themselves.

Managed Data Services: VRO owns and manages the shared data services offered on their platform, taking the responsibility off their partner teams.

DevOps Management: VRO handles all the DevOps responsibilities for the overall platform, allowing partner teams to focus on building and improving their applications.

Current Services on the Platform

BEP Development Notes Service

The Benefits Enterprise Platform, formally Benefits Gateway Services development notes service allows partner teams to create a note on a veterans file. At this time, we only utilize the “createnote” feature but there are several other data points we could follow if additional teams would find it useful such as: Deleting notes, finding notes, and updating notes

Use Case: There is an application on VRO called EP Merge, which leverages the BEP development notes service to create a note on a veterans file that says, “Issues moved to confirmed EP400 claim”. This allows them to stay compliant when merging duplicate claims.

BIP Claims API

The Benefits Integration Platform (BIP) Claims API, which is up and running on the VRO Platform, allows partner teams to get and update information on the VBA Benefits Claim. This information comes from VBMS and is ultimately stored in the VBA Corporate Database. We track 23 data objects related to the claim such as: Claim ID, Benefit Claim Type, Claim Lifestyle Status, claim satiation of jurisdiction, participant ID, and Veterans name.

Use case: There is an application on VRO called EP Merge, which leverages the BIP claims service to read data about contentions on both a pending EP claim and an EP400 claim. If the contentions are eligible to move, they change the temporary station of jurisdiction via the API and "move" the contentions from the EP400 to the pending EP. Once they are moved over, they use the API again to cancel the EP400 claim.