Health

Help Wanted: Health Navigators

Kyla WilliamsMarch 29, 2015

The Smart Chicago Collaborative seeks to immediately contract with 2 Health Navigators to work in our Smart Health Centers program. The Health Navigator will provide assistance to patients/participants in Smart Health Centers to connect to their own medical records and in finding reliable information about their own health conditions utilizing the internet or other technology tools. This position requires a high level of teamwork, flexibility, and customer focus; the ability to interact with youth, adults, and the general public in an appropriate manner is required.

The ideal candidate will have an interest in community health with great writing and documentation skills. All candidates must be proficient with using basic technology hardware and software, familiarity with social media and comfortable providing health-related information in a creative manner. An added plus would be experience in using lightweight tools such as video, photos, and screencasts to provide feedback to the Smart Health team.

Full details on the position and how to apply can be found here.

Join mRelief at Chicago’s #CodeAcross Food Stamp Hackathon

Christopher WhitakerFebruary 16, 2015

On February 20th, the mRelief team will be hosting a Food Stamp Hackathon as part of Code for America’s Code Across event.

mRelief.com empowers Chicagoans with a tool to access the welfare system in unprecedented ways by determining food stamp eligibility through text messaging and web tools which direct people to their next step in the application.

Sponsored by Microsoft and in partnership with the Harris Food Policy Advocacy Group, Code for America, and Women of Code, mRelief’s hackathon invites thought leaders in policy and computer programming to expand current eligibility screening for food stamps in Illinois. The event will focus on policy rules that impact overall eligibility, accessibility for students and applicants of varying types of citizenship, and documents that people need for food stamp eligibility.

As part of Code for America’s national Code Across event, mRelief has also set up a national repository for food stamp hackers across the country to view code for their web and SMS tools and submit the code for their states so that mRelief can sustain the work beyond the weekend. CodeAcross is a weekend of civic hacking events hosted by nodes of the Code for America network around the world. It is timed to coincide with both the last weekend of the Code for America Fellows residency and International Open Data Day. The goal of CodeAcross is to activate the Code for America network and inspire residents everywhere to get actively involved in their community.

The local event and mRelief’s national challenge on Github was organized by the all-women software development team at mRelief. mRelief’s tools simplifies the social service qualifying process with for food stamps and many other immediate needs. Illinois residents can check to see if they’re eligible for a variety of healthcare, rental assistance, cash assistance, transportation, and child welfare related programs.

Full details of the event can be found here.

Follow, the team on twitter at @mrelief_form

Attend the local event at: bit.ly/chifoodstamps

Sign up for the national event at: bit.ly/foodstampsusa

Smart Chicago and the Concept of “Patient Centered”

Smart ChicagoFebruary 8, 2015 1 Comment

We have a number of health programs here at Smart Chicago, all of which are run by my colleague, Kyla Williams. In working on these projects, I’ve come across a number of intriguing concepts, just like one would in any sub-speciality. Chief of these concepts, for me, is “patient-centered”.

To me, a phrase like this is a tell. Any time an industry, company, or organization starts talking about “user-driven”, “customer-focused”, or “patient-centered” strategies, it is an indication that they’ve not been driven, focused, or centered in that direction in the past.

I’ve spent the majority of my career in the world of developing Web sites. In that sub-specialty, the idea of being focused on users is pretty much all there is. If you don’t have users, if you’re not making something that appeals to them and serves their needs, you’ve got nothing.

I don’t have any particular insight into the healthcare industry, since I’ve never worked in it. I can tell you from personal experience as a consumer of healthcare and as a general observer of pop culture, however, that I’ve never felt that patients were at the center of the experience.

Patient portals seem designed to deliver as little information as possible and optimize for medical professionals. Exporting information to give to other caregivers is cumbersome. Integration with email is weak— you have to log in to the system to get even the most innocuous information, like the details of a visit you just scheduled over the phone.

In 2015, we are embarking on and expanding a number of initiatives designed to get us deeper into the patient-centered trend. Our CUTGroup methodology is a recognized as a leading way to gather and act on the feedback of regular residents. The Smart Health Centers model, where we help place trained health information specialists in clinics to assist patients in connecting to their own medical records and find reliable information about their own conditions, is deeply patient-centered. Our Health Data Liberation Meetup Group is at the conceptual forefront for patient control

We think we have a lot to offer, and we’re excited about the work to come.

Health Data Ecosystem is Strengthened by Purple Binder’s Adoption of Open Referral

Smart ChicagoJanuary 23, 2015

Joe Flesh of Purple Binder at the Health Data Consortium Event at 1871, November 2013

At Smart Chicago, we work with a lot of partners to encourage the growth and development of the civic innovation sector of the technology industry. There is a nascent ecosystem that thrives on standards and sharing.

Yesterday we were happy to see a big step forward in the ecosystem as it relates to health data and software, when Purple Binder announced that they had adopted the OpenReferral standard. The announcement centers around some with whom we’ve toiled with over the years.

Code for America has been a longtime partner of Smart Chicago— we’ve worked with them since our very start. They have been devoted to an OpenReferral standard to help with the sharing of community resource directory data. Code for America is an indispensable national leader in the work that we care about here at Smart Chicago
Purple Binder, a Chicago company that matches people with community services that keep them healthy, has been a partner of Smart Chicago since July 2013, when we hired them to create their first API in order to fuel our Chicago Health Atlas project. They’ve been a shining light here in the civic tech scene— a private company building software that matters while helping others in the ecosystem
We also work with mRelief, an app that helps Chicagoans determine their eligibility for government benefits. We support them through our Developer Resources and CUTGroup programs. to help Chicago residents see what social services they qualify for. Both of these applications use data provided by Smart Chicago’s contract with Purple Binder

Purple Binder’s API is the first to use the Open Referral standard to transmit social services data between two applications. This is a big deal, and a moment worth celebrating, with more work ahead.

California Healthcare Foundation: Preventing Foodborne Illness in Chicago

Smart ChicagoJanuary 21, 2015

Here’s an interesting article covering how improvements in food safety can be traced directly to open data initiatives. Snip:

Chicago health officials and their partners are also using social media to increase the reporting of suspected food-related illnesses. For example, using the city’s FoodBorne Chicago application, health officials are mining the tweets and online reviews of consumers who mention being sickened by food establishments and contact these consumers to file a report with the CDPH. Developed in partnership with the Smart Chicago Collaborative, this program’s innovative use of social media has increased reports of food poisoning and identification of restaurants violating health codes, according to the report “Health Department Use of Social Media to Identify Foodborne Illness — Chicago, Illinois, 2013–2014,” published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Other cities, such as New York, are testing similar uses of consumer rating websites such as Yelp.

Incomplete List of Apps Using the Open311 API in Chicago

Smart ChicagoDecember 26, 2014

It’s been years since the City of Chicago launched their implementation of Open311, a standard for reading and writing 311 service requests. Here’s an incomplete, idiosyncratic list of apps that are currently using the City of Chicago Open311 API. If you know of one that I don’t have listed here, please let us know!

311 Super Mayor Emanuel: Fixing Chicago’s problems one 311 request at a time. Beyond the obvious fun of an 8-bit mayor that hops over a red porcupine when a service request is submitted, this is a real-time system that refreshes the page as new requests are submitted. Skyline graphic by TJ McKimmey, logo by Angel Kittiyachavalit; most other stuff by Ben Sheldon. Check out the source code on Github.

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