Allow additional control and checks around to when evidence is shared between cases

Hi John,
We are pleased to inform you that your enhancement request has been delivered in the new release of IBM Social Program Management, version 7.0.11.0.

A new hook point has been introduced to provide extra control over when evidence is shared between cases.
More information can be found in the"Evidence broker improvements" section in the What's New Guide: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS8S5A_7.0.11/com.ibm.curam.content.doc/whats_new/spm_7011_whatsnew.dita

Thank you for taking the time to share your ideas with us. We are now closing this request as delivered.

Regards,
Shane McFadden, SPM Offering Management team
You can find more information on the request process here.

Hi John,

We have reviewed your enhancement suggestion. Based on the information provided, our understanding of your request is as follows:

You are requesting the ability to restrict evidence from being shared from a source application case to a target application case when the dates of the applications are not the same, and also to prevent sharing when the case owners are not the same.

The theme is aligned with our current multi-year strategy for our product and we have accepted your suggestion as a consideration for a future release. Not all items under consideration will make it into a release. As plans are confirmed, you will be notified when a specific release includes this enhancement.

Thank you for taking the time to share your ideas with us. We are committed to involving our users in building our product roadmap and appreciate your suggestions.

Regards,
Shane McFadden, SPM Offering Management team
You can find more information on the request process here.

Hi John,

I just received feedback that we may be able to address this enhancement so I am reopening it.

I will update shortly with further information.

Thank you,
Shane McFadden, SPM Offering Management team

Hi John,

We have reviewed your enhancement suggestion. Based on the information provided, our understanding of your request is as follows:
* The same evidence can exist on two different application types for a client (Best Start Grant (BSG) and Scottish Child Payment (SCP)) the evidence for the one-off payment should only start from the application date, rather than the true start date which is on the on-going benefit. Therefore the request is to control the sharing of evidence only trigger brokering on auth/deny when the App Cases were received on the same day.

Our offering currently provides a way to address this issue. Since the start and the end dates on the evidence type won't ever match across Best Start Grant (BSG) and Scottish Child Payment (SCP). Therefore it appears that these evidence types are logically equivalent rather than identical; they have attributes in common but both have attributes that will never be identical/match so shouldn't be used in a comparison or shouldn't be mapped across cases. We feel the logically equivalent capabilities within Evidence Broker can be used to satisfy the requirements here as you can use it to set up mapping for all attributes except for start and end dates. It supports the use of conditions also around if/when the mapping occurs, for example only map based on certain types and so on. This should provide the additional controls and checks you are looking for.

We are closing this request and do not plan to take any further action. If you believe we have misunderstood your request please respond within 7 days with clarifications.

Thank you for taking the time to share your ideas with us. We are committed to involving our users in building our product roadmap and appreciate your suggestions.

Shane McFadden, SPM Offering Management team
You can find more information on the request process here.

Hi John,

Thanks for your reply.

Since the start and the end dates on the evidence type won't ever match across Best Start Grant (BSG) and Scottish Child Payment (SCP). Therefore it appears that these evidence types are logically equivalent rather than identical; they have attributes in common but both have attributes that will never be identical/match so shouldn't be used in a comparison or shouldn't be mapped across cases. We feel the logically equivalent capabilities within Evidence Broker can be used to satisfy the requirements here as you can use it to set up mapping for all attributes except for start and end dates. It supports the use of conditions also around if/when the mapping occurs, for example only map based on certain types and so on. This should provide the additional controls and checks you are looking for.

Please reply back with your response to this information and if you are happy for this request to be closed.

Thank you,
Shane McFadden, Cúram SPM Product Management team

Hi Shane,

Thanks for the detailed response.

I agree, it is correct to say that the start date of the business object is taken as when we first receive the evidence, and as a result, it does tie the evidence closely to the specific case that the evidence was received with. Which results with having an evidence that doesn't line up with the real world information that the evidence is to capture.

As for the design decision for aligning evidence date and application date, this evolved in this way to fit the needs of the one benefit, which was only to have the one day lifecycle. And because there's was no guarantee that the case would be handled by the client case workers on the day of receipt, the evidences were set up to centre around the application date, rather than a processing date, so that the applicant would not miss out on eligibility due to agency delays. As we have added additional similar benefits that do require the use of these evidences, we are seeing the difficulties with the way the initial evidences work.

While I understand that our evidence design and use of dates are less than ideal, and makes our need to check that the application dates on the case match up, there still is the request for a way to add additional checks before sharing. For our example, to only allow evidence to broker when the case owners are the same, so that case workers are not confused by data changing on one of their cases that they are not aware of.

Thanks,
--John F.

Hi John,

Thanks for the earlier reply, we have some more information to share with you.

To give some context/background on the rationale for sharing evidence. With the new evidence broker, evidence is shared as business objects, this includes the full timeline of evidence since this represents how a business object changed/evolved over time. You'll see we've reflected this in the Incoming Evidence UI also, as we present the evidence there in a timeline manner - again to show how a business object changed over time and how this business object is currently stored on the existing case vs the incoming evidence. This is on the basis that a business object represents something in the real world for a client/family and therefore it has a specific start date. With this approach, it shouldn't matter what case/application the business object is on it will still have the same start date/timeline, therefore the data can be synchronized everywhere. Chunking the business object up and taking sub-sections of the timeline is not really synchronizing the data, as for temporal evidence the start date is important, it is the anchor date for that object.

From the description in this request, it sounds like the start date for some evidence types is not the real start date of the business object but rather the application date. We feel this approach ties the evidence very tightly to a case/application that therefore limits the ability to share it elsewhere. One of the examples given was pregnancy evidence, for real-world data a pregnancy would have a very particular time period that would have no correlation to application date so if a customer indicates a due date, from this it could be possible to calculate backwards to the pregnancy start date. If the pregnancy evidence can be defined in isolation of a specific application/case/product the data can exist independently can therefore suitable for sharing anywhere.

Rather than go ahead with the request, we wanted to further explore the evidence design decision with aligning evidence start date with the application date. As it is this decision that really is causing the evidence sharing to fail in into comparisons, if it were correctly representing the start date of the business object the start date would be the same throughout.

Please reply back with your response to this informaiton and any further questions or insights you may have.

Thank you,
Shane McFadden, Cúram SPM Product Management team

Hi Shane,

Thanks for the reply.

- "What evidence is brokered? Does this evidence contain the 'application date' referred to in the first statement?"
We have evidences that are related to pregnancy (due date, number of babies expected, etc), residence, and other benefits that the Person might be in receipt of.
All of these evidences have the normal start/end date fields, which are set to use the application date as the start date, and this start date is used in matching the Application Case's application date. The difficulty is if we broker evidence from the Wednesday on-going app case (from my earlier example), back to the Monday one-off app case. The start dates on the evidences brokered over to the one-off app case would now be later than the application date, making the applicant ineligible.

- "In the new evidence broker, the data matching is on all attributes in the evidence and therefore if the dates not match up, as stated here they don't, then it would naturally fail automatic data matching so would be sent to the Incoming Evidence page for a caseworker to review and progress."
If the evidence start and application dates match, we still want to check against the case owner before sharing evidences. And if the evidences start and application start dates don't match (and/or the caseworker), we don't want the evidence to share at all, not even into Incoming Evidence.
This is to prevent confusing caseworkers (if there happen to be more than one caseworker processing the cases) by having evidence changes appearing on cases where they're not expecting.

Thanks again,
--John F.

Hi John,

In order to evaluate your request, we require that you provide more detail so that we can fully understand your requirements.

There are two statements in the use case:
1: "The eligibility of the one-off benefit is calculated based on date of application."
2: "If the Wednesday App Case is processed first the evidence will broker over to the Monday App Case on Authorise. When the Monday App Case is processed by a caseworker, it is no longer eligible only because the dates don't match up, not for any other reason."

What evidence is brokered? Does this evidence contain the 'application date' referred to in the first statement?
In the new evidence broker, the data matching is on all attributes in the evidence and therefore if the dates not match up, as stated here they don't, then it would naturally fail automatic data matching so would be sent to the Incoming Evidence page for a caseworker to review and progress.

If we do not receive this information within 30 days, this request will be closed.

Thank you,
Shane McFadden, Cúram SPM Product Management team

Hi John,

Thank you for your enhancement request.
We require some further analysis to determine whether or not this enhancement can be considered in a future release.
I will provide another response when our investigation is complete.

Thank you,
Shane McFadden, Cúram SPM Product Management team