[Facility Locator] Display cemetery services on Facility Locator

[mmiddaugh]

Status

[2025-01-23] Schema provided, unblocked
[2024-12-16] Schema delayed by upstream decisions; should be available 12/24
[2024-12-11] [Fran] Michelle reports that Adam at Lighthouse will have the schema to us by Monday, 12/15.

Description

The Facility Locator allows Veterans to search for national and VA grant-funded cemeteries (State, Territory and Tribal Veterans Cemeteries) but does not include information about the funeral and burial services available. The need to include these details was emphasized during a Subcommittee on Disability Assistance & Memorial Affairs Oversight Hearing on 11/13/2024. (1:20 mark)

The national cemetery data source includes a status field with possible values of "Open", "Closed", or "Cremation Only" representing whether or not the cemetery has space for new, subsequent, or cremation only internments. Equivalent data is not yet available in the data source for grant-funded cemeteries.

Information about burial space is displayed on NCA's Find a Cemetery page and on cemetery detail pages.

Once this data is available in the Lighthouse API, we should be able to make the information available in the Facility Locator. MVP may be brief description on Facility Locator search results card and inclusion on the detail page.

High-level Requirements

• Cemetery Search results cards:
  • Display the following wording as a link to the cemetery detail page: Find out about available burial space
• Cemetery Detail page:
  • Display one of the following four statuses, along with the standard definition for each. Note that the statuses will not be custom for each cemetery; they will be one standard definition for each status.
    • Open
    • Closed
    • Cremation Only
    • Under Construction
    • If there is no status available, display on the Detail page under the 'Burial status' header: 'Call for availability'
• Cemetery offices:
  • At this time we're assuming that offices won't be sent via the API.

Additional Information:

• Lighthouse will provide the schema (they are trying to get it to us before Christmas).
• LH will provide both the status and definitions in the LH API (this info is already in the data).
• There are nationals and state. We are trying to harmonize everything regardless of type of cemetery.
• Lighthouse will not be able to have the office and non-VA granted funded sites excluded from the API before we do the burial status work so we will need to account for locations without a burial status (at least in the short term). Decision TBD on how to accomplish not displaying statuses for them, or?

Questions & Answers

• Question: Will the status and definitions be in the main data? Or services addendum? Or some new endpoint? We will need to update Vets-api if not in the main data.
  • Answer: Michelle believes it's in the main data but will confirm.
• Question: What if there is no status?
  • Assume everything will have a status.
  • Update 12.20.2024: Lighthouse will not be able to pull offices and non-grant-funded locations out of the data prior to this work so we should prepare to handle locations with null burial status values
• What about offices?
  • Offices may get pulled out of the data. See below
  • Update 12.20.2024: Lighthouse will not be able to pull offices and non-grant-funded locations out of the data prior to this work so we should prepare to handle locations with null burial status values
• Question: Which of the following would be easier, considering that Lighthouse will not be able to have the office and non-VA granted funded sites excluded from the API before we do the burial status work so we will need to account for locations without a burial status (at least in the short term). (1) to not add the link to view the status if the burial status is empty, OR (2) to display as burial status is unknown if the burial status is empty. Note that it may also depend on how LH approaches this in the data.
• Answer: TBD

Design

Facility Locator Cemetery Services page

Examples

Cemetery pages have a range of descriptions for open and closed, based on new vs subsequent for Veterans vs family members. Definitions will be confirmed with NCA. "Call for status" may be be needed.

Examples

Fort Missoula Post Cemetery

• Data: status = Closed
• On the Find a cemetery page for Montana - Burial Space: Closed
• On the NCA Fort Missoula Post Cemetery page - [BURIAL SPACE] Fort Missoula Post Cemetery is currently closed to new interments. The only interments that are being performed are subsequent interments for Veterans or eligible family members in an existing gravesite.

Yellowstone National Cemetery

• Data: status = Open
• On the Find a cemetery page for Montana - Burial Space: Open
• On the NCA Yellowstone National Cemetery page - [BURIAL SPACE] This cemetery has space available to accommodate casketed and cremated remains.

Woodlawn National Cemetery

• Data: status = Cremation only
• On the Find a cemetery page for New York - Burial Space: Open
• On the NCA Woodlawn National Cemetery page - [BURIAL SPACE] This cemetery has space available for cremated remains in a columbarium only.

Dependent on UX ticket (completed): #19916

Designs

• Search card design: https://www.figma.com/design/GvNVeG9GAXZaBpny7vNxZP/Facility-Locator?node-id=1355-20617&t=BaWAyFcGb8TkuYKI-0
• Detail page design: https://www.figma.com/design/GvNVeG9GAXZaBpny7vNxZP/Facility-Locator?node-id=1430-31210&t=BaWAyFcGb8TkuYKI-0

User story

AS A Veteran, family member, or other beneficiary searching for cemeteries on the Facility Locator
I WANT to know whether or not the cemeteries in my search results are open to new interments
SO THAT I can easily plan a burial.

Engineering notes / background

Similar pattern - Search result cards for community emergency and urgent care locations include "Call to confirm services and hours"

Approved Schema

• Joe Justice has confirmed in Slack "..yes, based on the dialogue back and forth we are moving forward with."

id Label
BURIALS_OPEN : "Burial space available"
BURIALS_CREMATION_ONLY : "Cremation internments only"
BURIALS_CALL_FOR_STATUS : "Call for burial status"
BURIALS_UNDER_CONSTRUCTION : "Cemetery is under construction"

Analytics considerations

Testing & QA

Scope / Impact analysis

What, if anything, could break as a result of this change?
Engineer should assess this when approaching PR.

Roles / assignments

After functional testing, code review, accessibility review, and design review can happen in parallel.

• Functional testing: @FranECross
• Code review:
• Design review:
• Accessibility review:
• Product acceptance: @FranECross and @mmiddaugh

Acceptance criteria

MVP AC

• When Lighthouse provides a status for VA cemeteries, the Facility Locator search results card displays that status e.g. - Displayed on the Facility Locator search results card: a link displaying just under the phone number: Learn more about burial status.
  • When clicked, the link should open the Facility's detail page
• Displayed on the Facilities Locator Detail Page: under the heading "Burial space", that cemetery's current burial status, with it's standard definition displayed under it:
  • Closed to new interments
    • Standard definition for this status displays under the status
  • Cremation Only
    • Standard definition for this status displays under the status
  • Open to new interments
    • Standard definition for this status displays under the status
  • Under Construction
    • Standard definition for this status displays under the status
  • If there is no status from Lighthouse, display 'Call for availability'. No definition will display under this wording.
• Does this product have an existing regression test plan?
  • Yes, link
  • Yes (in progress) link
    .

[eselkin]

A few things to consider:

1. Blocked on data schema from Lighthouse
2. Need to update vets-api (if it comes in the facility data it's probably ok, but if they put it in one of the sub-queries like facilities/nca_999/services we'll need to update the main search on /facilities_api/v2/va to do the same query to services that we do on /facilities_api/v2/va/nca_999 - potentially a 3-5pts and put in an argument to make services lookup conditional --- because we don't always want to make a 2nd query for each query we run on FL)
3. Blocked v-w updates on design
4. Update vets-website FL results cards - 3-5pts? Depending on the size of change
5. Update vets-website FL/dynamic pages for nca - 3-5pts? As above

[FranECross]

Can potentially combine 4&5 above, with points of 5-8 max. #2 needs to be its own ticket at 3-5 points.

[FranECross]

Are these tickets sequential? Other than data from LH and design.

• Design, 4, 5 sequential.
• Can do 3,4,5 before we get data from LH.
• AC: # 2 update swagger document/other documentation.

[FranECross]

Info will come across from LH in the same API.

Michelle to confirm if the options/info coming from the detail page is different than what it on the tile.

[mmiddaugh]

@FranECross We will likely need a way to include the definition for the status

I see at least three options
1- The Facility Locator detail page already links to the relevant NCA cemetery page. The link label could be updated to something like, "See burial status and cemetery details"
2 - Display the corresponding definition on the Facility Locator detail page (when status is closed, the detail page shows the status and the definition of closed"
3 - Display all definitions on each Facility Locator detail page, regardless of that cemetery's status

This might be a good topic for the UX sync?

[FranECross]

@FranECross Find out from LH if we'll get info if there is no information available so we can display "Call # for status.

[FranECross]

@FranECross Check to see why this isn't on the epic.

[FranECross]

@eselkin Do you feel this should be two tickets? Search card and detail pages?

[FranECross]

@Agile6MSkinner @eselkin @chriskim2311 Michelle has confirmed that Adam at LH will get us the schema on Monday 12/15, so this can be worked on either in Sprint 19, or if not in that Sprint, definitely in Sprint 20 (goal is release by end of Jan 2025). I've tagged Chris in case Eli isn't able to work on this and it's a possibility for Chris to tackle. cc @mmiddaugh

[jilladams]

Noting from 12/16 LH sync: https://trello.com/c/cLCqjjZ7#comment-67609de136baecf0f96e0475, schema delayed, now expected by ~12/24. (Added to status notes in ticket body)