Smart Chicago and the Concept of “Patient Centered”

Health Data LiberationWe 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.

 

Help Wanted: Administrative Assistant at Smart Chicago Collaborative

The Smart Chicago Collaborative is hiring an administrative assistant to help us support our work.

The Administrative Assistant will help us with coordinating schedules, requests for information, meetings, and events that surround our work. This may sound simple, but as a collaborative organization we work with a ton of consultantspartners, and funders to get everything done. Throughout the course of our work, we try to keep everything documented and are looking for additional help to do that.

We’re looking for somebody that  has at least two years of experience and great web, writing, and communication skills. As a technology outfit, our ideal candidate would be somebody who is interested in technology and not afraid to try out new tools.

More importantly, we’re looking for somebody who is community service oriented. Our work centers around using technology to create an impact in our communities and we’re looking for somebody who wants in the game.

Full details on the job posting can be found here!

Connect Chicago Featured in Report on how mapping is used to expand access to education environments

New America LogoThe Connect Chicago website, a resourced maintained by Smart Chicago showing free computer access and digital skills locations across the city, is featured in Putting Learning on the Map: Visualizing Opportunity in 21st Century Communities. Published at New America, an organization “dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the Digital Age” and authored by Lindsey Tepe, Policy Analyst  in their Education Policy Program, here’s how they frame the report:

Rising income inequality has been the subject of heated debate in 2014, and education is often proffered as a remedy. But do all American learners have access to the educational opportunities that lead to success in the 21st century?

In a new report, Putting Learning on the Map: Visualizing Opportunity in 21st Century Communities, author Lindsey Tepe argues for the greater use of community-level mapping to answer this question, exposing at the local level where resources are abundant and where there are disparities. The report spotlights examples of mapping initiatives that span the education spectrum—across early learning, public school, higher education, and informal learning environments such as computing centers and public libraries.

Here’s an extended snip about the Connect Chicago site:

Recognizing that many other public institutions, in addition to community technology centers, provide access to computing technologies and wireless connectivity, the city of Chicago began the project Connect Chicago. The project was designed to help residents throughout the city identify spaces where they could go to access information online. As Chicago’s Office of Innovation and Technology explains, “Connect Chicago brings all these resources to one virtual place, allowing residents and visitors—including those with limited digital skills—to easily find convenient and publicly-accessible technology resources and services.”

To easily find these resources and services, Connect Chicago mapped their locations, along with pertinent information such as operating hours. Residents of the city can search on smartphones by address—or by physical maps posted throughout Chicago’s public transit system—to locate the closest places where they can access computers to go online. The map includes community technology centers along with other informal learning environments that have online access, including public libraries and schools, city college campuses, senior centers, workforce centers, youth career development centers, and even Chicago Housing Authority locations that provide wireless Internet access.

You can download the report directly here.

Chicago School of Data Highlighted in the Chicago Community Trust Annual Report

chicago-school-of-data-logoOur Chicago School of Data project is highlighted in the 2014 Annual Report of the Chicago Community Trust.  Here’s a snip:

More data shared by more organizations will result in more benefits for everyone. That’s the premise of the Chicago School of Data, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and spearheaded by the Smart Chicago Collaborative, a funder collaborative of The Chicago Community Trust.

“We want to help organizations use data and technology to do their jobs, be more effective and make lives better,” explains Dan O’Neil, executive director of Smart Chicago (pictured at left). “Our objective is to pull together all of the great energy we see in nonprofit, government and other sectors in a cohesive way that can support everyone.”

We also talked about how important it us for us to be situated in the region’s community foundation:

O’Neil says Smart Chicago’s location within the Trust headquarters was invaluable to achieving these successes. “The Trust is at the center of all the work that we aim to be involved in, and being here provides us with an ideal vantage point,” he says. “It makes it easy for us to do outreach and build relationships, and that is so important for our long-range goals.”

Here’s the spread and here’s the complete text:

CCT 2014 Annual Report - Chicago School of Data - Page 1

CCT 2014 Annual Report - Chicago School of Data Page 2

 

Remarks at Gigabit City Summit, Kansas City, MO, January 2015

Following is a presentation I made to the Gigabit City Summit.

Slide1First of all, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that I’m from Chicago, and Chicago is not a gigabit city. I think it would be fair to characterize us as gigabit-curious.

It was a great day here yesterday.

I see people here like Blair Levin, who is so good at analyzing the raw economics behind the macro-market of broadband provision, and Susan Crawford, who is so good at seeing the market distortions and the raw inequities that those economics lay bare.

So I am here— we are here, as a delegation, from Smart Chicago— me, Kyla Williams, Sonja Marziano, and Christopher Whitaker, because we toil in the same fields as you.

When the tag-team mayors — Sly James of Kansas City, MO and Mark Holland of Kansas City, KS speak so eloquently and with such great precision and knowledge about the digital divide and robber barons, we’re with you.

When Margaret May was up here speaking of the need for paper, for information to be delivered to everyone, in the way they want to receive it, and are prepared to receive it, we are toiling with her.

So we are happy to be here. We are among friends, among fellow workers. Fellow toilers in these fields— the same fields that our President wrote about yesterday in his report on Community-Based Broadband Solutions. That report was subtitled, “The Benefits of Competition and Choice for Community Development and High Speed Internet Access”.

Community Development.

These are our fields. The ones we work together. The older I get, the grayer I get, the more convinced I am that structure and process matter. That it is hard to do something unless you explicitly set out to do it, and create modes and methods to do it. It’s currently fashionable in the world of civic tech to be all about people, but what I’ve come to value is concrete structures for actually doing that. For being all about people.

So that’s what I want to talk to you about briefly— the Smart Chicago model. Our structure and modes.

The Smart Chicago Collaborative is a civic organization devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology.

Slide2
Pretty much every organization has a set of principles or a mission statement or some other blah blah they put on their website. We actually live by ours. I repeat them at the start of every meeting, and they are a part of every decision we make. Our principles are: Technology, Open, Everyone, Chicago.

We’re all about technology. Everything we do relates to technology. We are of and about the Internet. Most of all, we believe in the transformative power of the Internet to change lives and build the economy for all. It is a simple matter of equity. Of justice.

We are open. In the technology industry, the primary manifestation of that is the use of open source code.But being open means more than using a particular license for our software. It means being truly open to others. Having open processes, so that people know what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and how they can affect it. Open minds, so that we can actually change our entire way of doing things if we discover another way. This is about allowing others “in”, wherever that may be in any particular situation. This room is one of those “in” places. We all need to be allowed.

I’ve seen that lots of organizations gain strength and efficiency from a laser focus. That can be geographical, or all about age, or a particular activity type. At Smart Chicago, because our work is rooted in technology, our focus is on everyone. We’ve seen that there is great value in the network. The network—the aggregation of human attention— is in fact, the great creator of corporate valuation

And Chicago is one of our values. It is our middle name. All of our work is done here. So we are finding ways to be helpful nationally without distracting us from our work is important to us. That’s why we’re here, in force, today.

Slide3

We have three key focuses: Access, Skills, and Data.

Access. If you’re not connected to the Internet, it is difficult for technology to be of much use to you. I know you all care deeply about that. We’re with you.

But if you can’t use the Internet, being connected isn’t going to be all that meaningful. That’s why we work on skills a lot, going back to the $15 million in BTOP programs that we helped administer.

And Data. We construe data as content. Because there has to be something meaningful to look at once you’re connected and skilled. If you’re connected to the Internet, and you know how to use it, and you’re doing nothing to improve your life, or the life of others, then we really haven’t gotten very far.

Slide4

We were founded and are guided by three organizations: The MacArthur Foundation, the Chicago Community Trust, and the City of Chicago. I report to a board that consists of leaders from each of these organizations.

Slide5

We function as a tech development outfit. We are a high-functioning tech firm that delivers on products focused on things like public health, early childhood education, and the justice system.

Slide6

And we run things like the Civic User Testing Group, a set of more than 800 Chicago residents who get paid to test civic apps, and our Developer Resources program, where we host dozens of apps on Amazon Web Services, Heroku, Twilio, Mapbox, and other systems. We allow others to be more effective— to provide clarity and impetus to the civic innovation sector of the technology industry.

Slide7

We see that all of you city delegations here are already workers in these fields. In many cases, you’ve been here before we did. Or you helped till the land to make it fertile. Removed the rocks and the dead tree stumps. We’re here to work with you.

Slide8

Let’s do this.

Demond Drummer joins Smart Chicago as Managing Director of the Smart Chicago Challenge

9655068657_916e949772_zToday Demond Drummer joins the Smart Chicago Collaborative as the Managing Director of the Smart Chicago Challenge, a plan to make Chicago the most dynamic digital city in the world.

Demond comes to us from Teamwork Englewood, where he has been a Tech Organizer. As part of his work there in the Smart Communities program, led by our partner LISC Chicago, he led a community engagement campaign that drove a 10% increase in home broadband adoption.

He also created Englewood Codes, a 10-week summer project where youth learn how to design, build and maintain their own multimedia websites. He originated LargeLots.org, a web app to promote the City’s Residential Large Lot Pilot Program in Greater Englewood. His work led to a ten-­fold increase in city-­owned residential lots transferred to private owners and to an expansion of the program to East Garfield Park.

The Smart Chicago Challenge is a new Smart Chicago program guided by a unique collaboration of dynamic partners: LISC Chicago, Chicago Public Library, the City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT), MacArthur Foundation, World Business ChicagoThe Chicago Community Trust, and Smart Chicago itself.

As Managing Director, Demond has primary responsibility for managing and facilitating the day-to-day activities of the Challenge and is accountable to the Challenge Steering Committee. I’m happy to serve as a member of that committee, along with Brian Bannon, Commissioner of the Library, Brenna Berman, Commissioner and CIO of DoIT, and Susana Vasquez, Executive Director of LISC Chicago.

Demond is just the fourth employee of Smart Chicago, joining Operations Director Kyla Williams, who has fiscal and project responsibilities across all our work, and Project Coordinator Sonja Marziano.

Please join me in welcoming Demond Drummer.

Columbia Journalism Review: Moving from “Projects” to Products

Today Smart Chicago was featured in this story in the Columbia Journalism Review: “How civic hackers are helping local journalism“. Here’s a snip:

“We are trying to create and encourage an alignment among all of the amazing players in this movement, so that what they create leads to products and services that people truly need,” says O’Neil, who was also one of the convenors of an early meet-up group, now called Open Government Chicago(-land). “When you move from [working on] ‘projects’ to ‘products,’ you can make an impact. And you can sustain your work.”

This is a core element in how we approach our work. If we don’t start creating popular products that people love, our movement will fade. We’ve been a leader in thinking around this, and we challenge the community to build break-out products.

That’s why we support the workers in the civic innovation sector of the technology industry. Sign up for our Developer Resources today.