omahane/lighthouse-facilities

lighthouse-facilities

The Lighthouse Facilities API provides information about physical VA facilities, including location, address, phone, hours of operation, and available services.

The API is a Spring Boot application, facilities, with supporting modules including facilities-api for the API model classes, facilities-mock-services and facilities-local-db for local development, and facilities-tests for integration testing.

For details about available endpoints and interactions, refer to the OpenAPI documentation on the Lighthouse Developer Portal.

System Components

What's going on?

• facilities is the primary application responsible for serving Facilities API requests. Requests are served against an operational database.
• facilities-operational-db is used to maintain ready to serve representations of facilities, operating status, and drive time bands. Facility data is updated nightly through the facilities collection process. Operating status and extended services may be updated at any time by CMS. Drive time band data is refreshed on an as-needed basis.
• facilities-timer is a Jenkins Job (Agent-J) that fires nightly to trigger the facilities collection/data reload process.
• Access to Care (ATC) provides wait times and satisfaction scores for various services offered by VA health facilities. This data is aggregated during the nightly facilities collection.
• Cemetery XML are externally-maintained XML Documents that provides information about national cemeteries as well as non-national cemeteries that are not managed by the VA. This data is aggregated during the nightly facilities collection.
• Website CSV is a CSV document that contains a list of facility website URLs, maintained in this repository. This data is aggregated during facilities collection to augment the live sources.
• Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW) undergoes a nightly ETL process to transfer various data resources to the SQL52 server, where it is consumed during facilities collection. Namely:
  • Mental Health, Clinical Services, and Stop Codes from the A01 server, sourced from the VHA Support Center (VSSC) and Office of Mental Health.
  • National Cemeteries and Benefit Centers from the NCA VBA SQL40 GIS server, sourced from the Geospatial Data Library (GeoBISL).
  • Health facilities and Veteran centers from the A06 server, sourced from Veteran Affairs Site Tracking (VAST) (VA Network Internal).
• Geographer Support Services Center (GSSC) Drive Band documents are periodically uploaded to the facilities application through management APIs. These are updated on a monthly basis.
• Content Management System (CMS) provides operating status and service details for various services offered by VA health facilities. This data is updated on-demand by CMS.

Data Flow

What's going on?

• The facilities collection process aggregates data from other services, databases, or manually managed files. Drive-time band and operating status are not part of collection. Collection is an expensive process that is performed periodically.
• Content Management System (CMS) is both a consumer and a producer of information. CMS will periodically pull all facilities to automatically populate content pages in Drupal. Additionally, regional administrators of CMS data may change the operating status, service details and extended service(s) at any time. This information is provided back to the Facilities API through a specialized CMS-dedicated endpoint. Operating status is stored in the operational database along side facility data.

Update Frequency for Data Sources

Facilities collection occurs every 24 hours. This updates the local cache in facilities-operational-db with the most up-to-date data.

• CDW, ATC, the Cemeteries XML, and the Website CSV are updated daily
• Drive Time Bands are updated monthly
• CMS data is updated on-demand by a data push triggered by the CMS platform

CDW Data Source Details

Within CDW, the following databases/tables are read during facility collection:

• Mental Health data is from A01.[OMHSP_PERC_Share].[DOEx].[FieldDataEntry_MHPhone].
• Clinical Services data and stop code data are from A01.[VSSC_Out].[DOEx].[DST_ClinicalServices].
• Facilities data is from A06.[CDWWork].[Dim].[VAST] which is populated from the VSSC SQL Server.
• National Cemeteries data is from SQL40.[BISL_GIS_SpatialData].[DOEx].[v_FacilityLocator_NCA].
• Benefit Centers data is from SQL40.[BISL_GIS_SpatialData].[DOEx].[v_FacilityLocator_VBA].

Local Development

Refer to health-apis-parent for basic environment setup (e.g., Java, Maven, Docker, etc.). Execute mvn clean install to build all of the modules, then follow the local development instructions for mock-services, local-db, and facilities.