Toxic Exposure Risk Activity — Claims Integration System
A centralized database of TERA records, prior concession patterns, and legal authority. Built so that veterans are never denied by silence.
Search by any combination of location, specialty, service period, condition, or exposure type.
The story behind TERA-CIS and why it exists.
Every day, veterans file claims for service-connected disabilities caused by toxic exposures during their military service. Burn pits. Contaminated water. Agent Orange. Asbestos. Oil well fires. And more. These exposures are real, documented, and devastating.
Yet thousands of veterans are denied benefits, not because their claims are wrong, but because the evidentiary infrastructure was never built to support them. A Toxic Exposure Risk Activity (TERA) memorandum comes back negative. Not because the exposure didn't happen. Because no one ever recorded it.
These veterans were not silenced by dishonesty or lack of evidence. They were silenced by silence. The institutional silence of a documentation system that never captured what they were exposed to.
"How should federal law and policy structure a centralized TERA documentation system to ensure that VA adjudicators have sufficient institutional evidence to concede toxic exposure, reducing veteran reliance on lay and secondary evidence for claims the evidentiary record should already support?"
TERA-CIS is a centralized claims integration database that gives VA adjudicators and Veterans Service Officers a single place to search for everything they need to make the right call on a toxic exposure claim.
Search by base, MOS, deployment location, vessel, service period, or diagnosis. Get back the documented exposures, the associated conditions, the scientific and legal evidence, and the prior concession rate for similar claims. All in one screen.
The goal is simple: make it easy to concede exposure when the record supports it. Adjudicators should not have to hunt across fragmented DoD and VA databases. Veterans should not have to prove what the records should already show.
TERA-CIS is built alongside doctoral research in Law and Policy examining how federal law should structure a centralized TERA documentation system to ensure equitable access to service-connected disability benefits. The capstone: Presumed and Proven: Redesigning the TERA Documentation Framework for Equitable Veterans' Toxic Exposure Adjudication, provides the legal and policy foundation for this system.
The researcher brings over eleven years of experience in Veterans Benefits Law, with daily firsthand knowledge of where the current system fails the veterans it is meant to serve.
Add new TERA records, locations, MOS profiles, and evidence sources to the database.