Here’s Kyla WIlliams of Smart Chicago talking about our Chicago Health Atlas project.
For the past year Chicago Health Atlas has tracked the growing amount of health data available to Chicago residents. The hope is that bringing all the information together in one place can help Chicagoans start to improve their own health. Smart Chicago Collaborative Program Officer Kyla Williams oversees the project and joins us in studio to talk about it.
On April 9, 2014, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released data on the amount and type of billing that individual doctors and institutions submitted to the Medicare program in 2012. Medicare pays for health care services to most persons aged 65 years or more and to persons who have a disability.
We have extracted the 8,104 records for “physicians and other suppliers” found in the database and with an address in Chicago. (A separate database contains inpatient and outpatient charges of institutions such as hospitals.) This file may be viewed and downloaded by clicking here. Some highlights of the data are as follows.
On April 22nd, Dominique Williams from LISC Chicago and our own Josh Kalov and Christopher Whitaker dropped by the OpenGov Hack Night to talk about the results of the ACA Outreach App.
The Smart Chicago Collaborative is proud to launch our latest version of the Chicago Health Atlas. Last fall, Smart Chicago conducted user testing on the Chicago Health Atlas. Out of those results, there were several points made on what we could improve. The main one being that it was difficult to find health resources on the site. We’ve taken the feedback from the test and used it as a basis to improve the new site. Here’s a rundown of the new features:
Today I’m participating in the session called, “Open and Online: Accessing and Using Health Data” at the Public Health Informatics Conference in Atlanta. Here’s the description:
This session will present “8 Principles of Open Health Data” to guide management of, access to, and governance of de-identified non-aggregate health data. Presenters will discuss the use of an online interactive Disability and Health Data System that uses Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System disability data and will present a framework for capturing newborn admission data from hospitals.
If you care about these issues, please consider joining the Health Data Liberation meetup group, which is meeting tonight at the Opportunity Hub (“Atlanta Intro to the 8 Principles of Open Health Data“, right next door to the PHIC Conference.
Join us in this fight.
We love text.
And as big fans of texting, Smart Chicago has had Twilio as part of our offerings for civic developers since the say we started the program. We’ve recently expanded our partnership with Twilio, and their local developer relations guru, Greg Bagues, to offer Twilio as a separate service through Smart Chicago. Twilio is a great product that makes it easy to create apps that can make and receive both calls and texts.
We use it in our own products:
We are also a customer of Textizen, which uses Twilio, including around the Creative Chicago Expo. Civic software developers like Chris Gansen use it to power apps like HealthNearMe.
Like we said, we’re big fans of texting. If you’re new to Twilio, we’ve put together a how-to post of how the app works.
If you’re a civic developer and are interested in using Twilio for your app, please fill out the form below.
