Work

Call to Action: Help OSM map areas hit by Typhoon Haiyan

Christopher Whitaker
Typhoon Haiyan

Typhoon Haiyan, photo by Karen Nyberg/NASA

While we’ve featured OpenStreetMap before, what you may not know is the important role they play during disasters.

During a disaster, the Humanitarian OpenSteetMap Team (HOT) activates to help coordinate mapping of disaster areas. These activities include mapping out roads, buildings, locations of refugee camps, and other resources. In addition, they also maintain a wiki with information about the disaster. To get an idea of what this looks like, here’s what the OSM community did after the earthquake in Haiti.

OpenStreetMap – Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

Currently, OpenStreetMap is looking for people to help in this effort. If you have an OpenStreetMap account, you can log into the OSM Tasking Manager and select tasks. Most of the current tasks involve tracing buildings and roads to help relief workers on the ground navigate.

If you don’t have an OpenStreetMap account, you can sign up for an account for free here. OpenStreetMap is easy to use and there are several tutorials available, including this one by Chicago’s very own Ian Dees.

If you have time available, please consider spending some time assisting OSM in the effort. For questions directly relating to the HOT Team at OSM, you can email them at [email protected].

Remarks to the Cook County Finance Committee in Support of the Cook County Bureau of Technology FY2014 Budget

Smart Chicago

This morning, along with a couple dozen other people, I spoke during the public comment section of the Cook County Board Finance Committee. The comments are limited to three minutes per person, and I covered my support for the technology portion of the Cook County Finance & Administration budget. I spoke in my capacity as co-chair of President Preckwinkle’s New Media Council, but the cool thing is that anybody can sign up to speak at these sessions. Here’s the full text:

Good morning Mr. Chairman and Commissioners. My name is Daniel X. O’Neil, and I am the Executive Director of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, a civic organization devoted to improved lives in Chicago through technology. Our founding partners are the City of Chicago, the MacArthur Foundation, and The Chicago Community Trust.

We also work very closely with the State of Illinois and the great County of Cook in order to do our work. I’ve interacted with a number of the members of this body in the course of my service at Smart Chicago and in my efforts in the open data movement. I very much appreciate the time I’ve spent with some of you, and I’d like to work with each of you on these matters.

I also serve, along with my friend and colleague Blagica Bottigliero, as co-chair of President Preckwinkle’s New Media Council, where we are charged helping the County develop a digital strategy to better engage, serve, and connect with the public.

In that capacity, I’ve come to greatly value the leadership of Cook County Chief Information Officer Lydia Murray. She is a clear thinker with a practical approach to solving the long-festering technology issues facing County government.

I appreciate the focus on reducing waste to save taxpayers’ money, the spirit of collaboration with the City of Chicago, the sound investments in improving Internet connectivity, and the attention paid in this budget to the baseline applications that make core County functions run.

I’m excited about the public website redesign project. The planned features of responsive design and a focus on the mobile experience can allow the County to make a giant leap in communication with the public.

The investments in core systems like the Criminal Justice Data Sharing System, revenue collection, and case management will lead to better service for the public.

I am especially looking forward to the planned improvements in the transparency, efficiency and accessibility of the County’s property tax system. That is sorely needed and long delayed.

I strongly urge you to support the Fiscal Year 2014 Budget of the Cook County Bureau of Technology. Thank you for your time.

Seal of Cook County, IL

Health Datapalooza: Deep dive into health data

Christopher Whitaker

In preparation for the Illinois Health Datapalooza, we wanted to take a deep dive into the different kinds of health data already available  to developers at the state, local, and federal level.  A big part of the datapalooza will be determine what we can do with health data.

CUTGroup 3: Chicago Health Atlas

Healthdata.gov

Healthdata.gov is the federal health portal run by the US Department of Health and Human Services. The federal government plays an outsized role in the healthcare field in part by managing Medicare and Medicaide. When a patient received a medical treatment and the federal government pays for it, HHS collects that data. They’ve released this dataset (Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) Provider Summary) to show the vast variation in cost between different service providers.  This particular data set has a well documented API to show how the data was constructed and what each field means.

There are also datasets that get deep into the minutiae of the day to day operations of the health care system. RxNorm is a query tool that’s used to provide normalized names for different pharmacy management systems. (So that if one pharmacy system calls it one name, you can quickly determine it’s name in another system.)

HospitalCompare

Healthdata.gov also provides the raw data that powers the Medicare Hospital Comparison tool. The tool allows patients to look for the best hospitals possible.

The healthdata.gov site continues to expand it’s offers and will be a great resource for developers, data scientists, and researchers going into the future.

Data.Illinois.Gov

The state’s data portal has 60 different datasets relating to health care. Many of these datasets are directories for different services such as hospitals, hospice care, and rural health centers.

Other datasets include interesting historical health information such as infant mortality  rates from 1907 to 2008,  divorce rates from 1958-2009,  and births by county in 2009.

Data.CookCountyIl.Gov

Bilingual Cook County Hospital Sign

The Cook County data portal has a number of datasets that stem from their administration of the Cook County Health and Hospital System. For example, the county has data about the cost of services for those detailed by the Cook County Sheriff’s Office,  causes of death in 2009,  and Cook County Vaccination Partners.

Data.CityofChicago.org

Auburn Gresham Chicago Health Atlas

The City of Chicago data portal also has several datasets that have health care implications. They include location-based data such as warming center locations, substance abuse treatment facilities,  and flu shot locations.

The city also has a number of datasets about the prevalence of health conditions within the city.  Many of these datasets, such as diabetes hospitalizations,  asthma hospitalizations, and low-birth rates,  are used to power the Chicago Health Atlas.

What’s NOT on the portals

Admittedly, there is not enough open data available on the various portals to be as innovative as our public health sector needs to be. Part of the mission of the Health Data Consortium is to foster the availability of health data and to build an ecosystem of health care innovation.  So, in addition to talking about data that’s already available, the datapalooza is a perfect opportunity to talk about data not currently available.

There are still slots available for both days.  You can find the registration link for the November 8th event here and the November 9th event here.

Two Great Illinois-Focused Health Data Events

Smart Chicago
U.S. CTO Todd Park at Healthbox Investor Day here in Chicago

U.S. CTO Todd Park at Healthbox Investor Day here in Chicago

There are two great statewide health data events coming up on November 8 and 9 in Chicago.

Putting Health Data to Work in Our States and Communities

First up, on Friday, November 8, is A Health Data Consortium Event: Putting Health Data to Work in Our States and Communities.

The event is organized in partnership with the Health Data Consortium, the State of Illinois, the California HealthCare Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It’s a gathering of thought leaders from the private, nonprofit, and government sectors confronting the most pressing health data issues in the U.S. health care system at the state and local level.

The day-long event will be the first of a series of Health Data Consortium forums focusing on state and local health data successes, challenges, and opportunities.  Invited speakers for the event include:

  • Pat Quinn, Governor of Illinois
  • Todd Park,  U.S. Chief Technology Officer
  • Bryan Sivak, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Chief Technology Officer
  • Dr. LaMar Hasbrouck, Director, Illinois Department of Public Health

More speakers and panelists to be announced. Register here for the event on November 8.

Illinois Health Datapalooza

The next day,  Smart Chicago will be helping host the  Illinois Health Datapalooza on November 9th at 1871. The datapalooza brings policy makers, health care practitioners, web developers, designers, and data scientists to find ways to make health data a deeper part of the technology scene Illinois.

The event is organized by the Health Data Consortium, the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH), the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) and the Smart Chicago Collaborative.

Christopher Whitaker, consultant and writer for Smart Chicago, has done lots to prepare for this event and will help guide the activities.

The morning sessions will be skill-sharing roundtables with representatives from Socrata, ESRI, and Healthdata.gov on hand to talk about available tools and resources for working with open health data. Midday activities will include brainstorming sessions on current challenges that healthcare policy makers and practitioners have in the field and an exploration into how civic innovation could help address them. The afternoon will feature unconference sessions (where attendees will can propose sessions on anything, from the new healthcare.gov to using Twitter to idenfity flu trends.)

Register for the event November 9th event here.

A Good Idea, on the Side of a Bus: Get A Flu Shot

Lots of work to be done

We’ve talked a lot about the value of civic partnerships have in creating healthier cities and how Chicago has been producing an impressive number of health related civic apps. However,  given the scope of the health care issue at both the local and national levels there is much more work to be done.

For the past few years, the Health Data Consortium  (A coalition of governments, academics, and health care providers formed to liberate health data) have hosted Datapaloozas to find innovative ways to use health data. To date, these events have always been held in Washington DC. This event will be the first of a series of regional gatherings that will bring the focus of health data to the state and local level.

There is an immense opportunity to harness health data into civic startups, to find ways to improve service delivery, and to use predictive analytics to help prevent disease. What’s needed is collaboration between civic technologists and health care practitioners.

We’ll hope you join us.