Review Request

The three forms used to intake AMA decision reviews correspond to the three decision review lanes as described in the AMA: supplemental claims, higher level reviews, and board appeals. The flow for processing an intake in any of these three lanes is similar, because the most complex part, adding issues, is almost identical regardless of the lane.

On the review screen, the user will be asked to record the receipt date of the form, the claimant information, as well as any other selections made on the form (these vary per form).

There are some automated checks to prevent typos from creating bad data. First, the receipt date must not be before the start date of AMA as this is impossible, and probably means there may be a typo in the date (i.e. "01/09/201"). Second, the receipt date cannot be in the future.

Additionally, the claimant must be selected from the list of potential claimants in the VBA corporate database. This is to ensure consistency of data between Caseflow and the VBA Corporate database. If the claimant recorded on the decision review is not recorded in the VBA corporate database, the user must add the claimant using VBMS or SHARE, or ask for assistance in adding it if they do not have access to either of these systems.

If all the data is validated on the review screen, then the user may advance to the Add Issues screen. On this screen, the user will input issues recorded on the veteran's decision review, attempting to match them to the decision they are contesting, or a potential duplicate issue in the legacy system. This is the crux of the Caseflow issue data model, and for that reason, it will be addressed in depth in the AMA Issues section of the documentation.