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products/health-care/digital-health-modernization/engineering/release-technical-strategy.md

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+# Health Apartment Release Technical Strategy
+
+This document discusses the options and concerns related to how to release health apartment features.
+
+The health apartment roll-out will be phased in a couple of ways:
+* Individual tools (secure messaging, prescriptions, health records, appointments) will be released as they become ready, rather than waiting for the entire suite of health tools to be ready.
+* Each individual tool may be released in phases as units of partial functionality are completed. These partial launch phases may be geared towards controlled user acceptance testing (UAT) or a broader opt-in beta/preview.
+
+Users at large won't be automatically redirected to tools on VA.gov until those tools are deemed to be feature-complete, i.e. all desired activities that are possible on MHV today are available on VA.gov. (We avoid saying feature _parity_ with MHV in case some features are determined not to be needed). 
+
+## Available Approaches - VA.gov Platform
+
+### Separate Subdomain
+**What it is:** A subdomain such as `health-beta.va.gov` where early access to features is enabled.
+
+**When it's appropriate:** In the context of the health apartment, probably never.
+
+**Limitations:** This option is described here because it has been raised as a possibility. But, instantiating a subdomain would have a very high compliance and infrastructure burden. Even approving a new public subdomain requires a multi-month approval process, plus implementation by both the VA.gov Platform infrastructure team and the VA Gateway Operations team. A new public SSL certificate has to be purchased and provisioned. Getting a subdomain to work with site authentication is liable to be complicated. And you still might need to employ some of the following techniques to further limit access. 
+
+A subdomain does make it more clear that the functionality is experimental, but that can also be accomplished via a banner on specific early-access pages within www.va.gov. 
+
+### Feature Flag - Specific Users
+
+
+### Feature Flag - Percentage of Users
+
+### Opt-in Beta
+
+### Released but Unlinked
+
+## Release Functionality on MHV
+
+
+
+## Release Phases - Secure Messaging
+
+What is the threshold for the minimum 
+
+## Open Questions
+1. How difficult is it to switch the URL path/slug of a VFS application? Is it a one-liner or does it require renaming a bunch of things? (Context for question is whether we need to decide the final URL path location for each tool sooner rather than later)