January – 2016 – Smart Chicago

News From Our Smart Health Centers Project

Smart ChicagoJanuary 6, 2016

A pillar of our Health work is our long-standing and successful Smart Health Centers project. Here’s a current look at what we’re up to online across the city:

Fantus Clinic

Anne Lin, Katie Reed, Michelle Vu, Bendarius King, Akya Gossitt, Zaundra Boyd, and Daniel Broome do direct support in the main waiting room at Fantus Health General Medicine Clinic. They help approximately 75 patients a week to log on and navigate the patient portal on ipads and laptops, teaching them how to send messages to their doctor and request prescription refills through the MyCookCountyHealth pateint portal.

The overall objective will increase meaningful use of the portal, which makes the patient more involved in care and helps the clinic conform with federal meaningful use regulations.

They also consult with nurses and other staff on patient workflow in order to help improve the clinic experience and reduce wait times. They’ve put their findings into a presentation to hospital staff and are helping them learn the back-end of the patient management system so they can track and log accurate patient wait times.

Many of the navigators work with the nutritionist at Fantus, helping Spanish-speaking patients, speaking before groups of people, and helping with document translation.

We’re also helping support the planning and setup of an obesity clinic— sourcing education materials, finding meal plan templates, recipes, and so on.

Jorge Prieto Family Health Center

Daniel Broome is staffed part-time at Prieto. He does all of the patient portal work and he is also developing an introductory video shown about the patient-centered medical home model that plays in the waiting room. This video was created by Farhad Ghamsari, Alicia Phillippou, and Kymon Odukoya.

Lawrence Hall Youth Services

Kymon Odukoya is staffed here at Lawrence Hall, where he works with youth, working on health awareness, nutrition, and healthy cooking demonstrations. He also demonstrates how to research health topics online.

Podcasts

Many of the navigators are also working on a new Smart Health Centers initiative— podcasts. You can hear them all on the Smart Chicago Soundcloud page.

Here’s a look at episodes to date:

https://soundcloud.com/smart-chicago/be-healthy-yall-episode-1-digital-divide-in-health-care

Suzy Connor Joins Smart Chicago as Consultant Focusing on Arts, Justice, and Education

Smart ChicagoJanuary 5, 2016 2 Comments

Yesterday marked the start of Suzy Connor’s work here at Smart Chicago. We’ve worked with Suzy over the last couple years in her work as the senior program officer for arts and culture at The Chicago Community Trust, where she created the Arts Infusion program and was responsible for a host of other grants that enhanced cultural vibrancy, access and diversity.

Most recently, we worked with her to launch Get Drive, a project that compiled resources for court-involved youth to clear their records (expunge.io!), get back in school, get a job, and get other support.

Suzy’s work over the years aligns perfectly with Smart Chicago’s work to improve lives in Chicago through technology mission. We’re excited about combining her professional expertise, experience, and networks in creative youth development & juvenile justice with our emerging models around civic engagement.

Suzy will strengthen the Smart Chicago justice work area and will help inform or stimulate our Connect Chicago, Chicago School of Data, and Youth-Led Tech programs. Her engagement will employ a number of the experimental modes we’ve investigated and we expect to be able to create new ones together.

Here’s a specific look at the work she’ll be doing:

Arts Infusion

Over the last six years at The Chicago Community Trust, Suzy created and led Arts Infusion. The Urban Institute recently completed a comprehensive evaluation of this program: Arts Infusion Initiative, 2010–15: Evaluation Report. The report is fascinating, and we will be sharing findings from report as we move forward.

Suzy will work to continue and expand the Arts Infusion cohort, focusing on teaching artists rather than organizations, with the goal of building a deep, diverse, and resilient community of practitioners. Our expansion efforts will include both arts-focused and technology-focused instructors working with teens and young adults in under-resourced communities, including court-involved youth.

Together, we will develop a coherent co-creation strategy with this cohort with communication at its core. The foundation of this cohort is not grants; it is communication and shared work. A civic engagement model rather than a social services model, based on principles found in Experimental Modes of Civic Engagement. We seek to help guide an expanded network to foster innovative approaches and respond to the needs articulated by practitioners themselves. Integral to this approach is the inclusion of young adult practitioners who are “alumni” of Chicago’s teen programs.

Connecting youth to technology

Suzy will also work to strengthen the links among released juveniles and Arts Infusion grantees, other arts and technology programs, and relevant resources. Smart Chicago is already a partner in this effort through Get Drive and Expunge.io.

We will incorporate recommendations from the Urban Institute evaluation to enhance strategies for using technology and social media to spark & sustain connections between court-involved youth and the people and resources they need to move forward in life.

This work also ties into our Youth-Led Tech program, where we will look to work in the detention center and connect those youth to community opportunities to build their skills. We’re also looking to evaluate how to replicate the Youth-Led Tech mode.

CPS Digital Arts Career Academy

Suzy will also lead Smart Chicago’s efforts to help to guide engagement, design, and advocacy efforts related to the development of a potential CPS Digital Arts Career Academy. Our focus will be on engaging the public and helping foster communication with the community around planning.

Smart Chicago’s commitment to developing a diverse IT workforce and its recent success with Youth-Led Tech makes it a valuable partner to CPS in this first-of-its-kind initiative.

Chicago Track

Lastly, and more loosely, Suzy will help the Trust grantee Office of Creative Industries at the City of Chicago to connect to the broader context of workforce development, which brings back the lessons of Investing in people and organizations as the key to civic tech.

We’re interested in helping build the workforce pipeline in digital media by integrating the Chicago Track project and career-oriented digital media nonprofits with the workforce development and technology sectors that are more adept at tracking trends and job growth. We hope to leverage the combination of our commitment to juvenile justice, the needs of the tech community for diversity, and the opportunity to strengthen a career pipeline for an important constituency in our city.

Join us in welcoming Suzy to Smart Chicago.

Announcing the January Connect Chicago Meetup: Co-Creating a Digital Access & Skills Referral Network

Denise LinnJanuary 1, 2016

To kick off 2016, the Connect Chicago Meetup Group is inviting all tech/digital skills instructors and program coordinators to convene and help us understand how our work and missions fit together.

Event Name: Co-Creating Chicago’s Digital Access & Skills Referral Network

Where: Chicago Community Trust

When: Friday, January 29, 2016 from 11am – 1pm (lunch provided)

All who are interested in attending should:

Join the Connect Chicago Meetup Group if you haven’t already
RSVP to the event at this link
Fill out the Digital Access & Skills Referral Network Survey

$1000 will be awarded to a participating program or training site! To be eligible to win the funds on behalf of a program or training site, you must be in attendance and have filled out the Digital Access & Skills Referral Network Survey.

Here is a glimpse of just some of the great work across Chicago that will be represented at the Meetup:

Why Build a Referral Network?

There are over 250 locations across the city where residents can access a computer and be trained for free. Having a long list of programs and public computing locations is not enough. We also want to understand the relationship between existing resources.

We’ve heard feedback from programs across the city like this: “We’d like to know where to get patrons and where to refer our patrons next in their learning paths. How does all of our work fit together?” or “we’d like to know what a roadmap for digital access & skills programming looks like across the City.”

We’ve also held focus groups with residents who had similar questions: “When I’m done at X program, I’d like to know where I should go next. What are my best opinions? What’s the next logical skill to work on or place/trainer to visit?”

Attendees will share their own program information, and share important information about their relationship to others’ programs — specifically, whether they would partner with that program, refer patrons to that program, or recruit patrons who finished that program.

We will pull the information collected that the January 29th Meetup together and release it. Our goal is to create a more fluid understanding of the great programs that are located all over the city in the service of a shared culture of learning.

Month: January 2016