Foodborne News

Leslie Durr Joins Smart Chicago as Project Coordinator

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Leslie DurrLeslie Durr  joins the Smart Chicago Collaborative as a Project Coordinator.She will serve as the point person for projects including Chicago Health Atlas, Smart Health Centers, Foodborne, Hive Learning Networks and Youth-Led Tech. She will also be working to add several new projects to our portfolio.

Her experience includes program development and grant management in the non-profit sector, most recently with the Southland Health Care Forum as the Project Director for the State of Illinois Get Covered Campaign.

Leslie has her Master of Science in Human Service Administration from Spertus College and Bachelor of Science in Mass Communications from Jackson State University.

You can follow her work on Twitter.

Please join us in welcoming Leslie Durr.

Foodborne Chicago is a Top 25 Innovation in Government

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Foodborne Chicago Twitter characterToday our product, Foodborne Chicago, was recognized by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Here’s their writeup:

FoodBorne Chicago
City of Chicago, IL

On March 23, 2013, the Chicago Department of Public Health and the SmartChicago Collaborative launched the FoodBorne Chicago web application with the goal of improving food safety in Chicago. FoodBorne Chicago tracks tweets using a supervised machine-learning algorithm that identifies the keywords of “food poison” within the Chicago area. This tool allows residents to report a food poisoning incident through 311 after the program identifies tweets with possible cases of food poisoning. The team then tweets back a link to submit an online web form where residents can identify where they ate, the date and time they frequented the restaurant, their symptoms, and send it through Open311. The information is sent directly to the Department of Public Health and, if warranted, an inspection team visits the restaurant in question and then lets the resident know the status of the investigation via e-mail. The algorithm gets smarter at identifying related tweets as the team replies to residents that are suspected to have a potential case of food poisoning to report. If several complaints occur together, these clusters can be investigated to prevent further illnesses from developing.

 

And here’s a snip from a press release from Mayor Rahm Emanuel:

The Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) has been recognized as a Top 25 program in this year’s Innovations in American Government Awards competition by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University for its FoodBorne Chicago program.

Two years ago, CDPH and the SmartChicago Collaborative launched the FoodBorne Chicago web application with the goal of improving food safety in Chicago.

“The Department of Public Health and the Department of Innovation and Technology used social media and technology to create a tool that makes food consumption in Chicago safer,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “It is innovative thinking like this that enhances and leverages available resources to make the most impact.”

California Healthcare Foundation: Preventing Foodborne Illness in Chicago

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California Healthcare FoundationHere’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.

 

Foodborne Chicago, Humans, and Big Data on the Data Mine Blog

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Foodborne Chicago, Humans, and Big Data on the Data Mine Blog

Here’s a post on the U.S. News & World Report Data Mine blog covering our Foodborne Chicago project: How Twitter and Your Lunch Can Solve Problems. Here’s a snip:

Daniel O’Neil, the executive director of Smart Chicago, who worked with the government on the algorithm, said the project is an example of how big data can be used by health professionals to help people.

“I think the field of big data often removes human beings from consideration,” he says. “Big data, as I see it being practiced, there’s very little direct engagement with people. All the data related to health care is generated from human beings and is crucial to the health and wellness of human beings. I think this project shows one way for big data to always be driven down to the human being and helping people. We need to always take it from big to small and always find out how technology can be of big use to people.”

Twitter Bot Helps Chicago Officials Find Dirty Restaurants (Popular Science)

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Twitter Bot Helps Chicago Officials Find Dirty Restaurants. Snip:

The Chicago Department of Public Health’s Twitter bot, plus a new online complaint form, helped the department identify 133 restaurants for inspections over a 10-month period. Twenty-one of those restaurants failed inspection and 33 passed with “critical or serious” violations. Not a bad haul.

Read the full article here.

Tweets Identify Food Poisoning Outbreaks – Scientific American

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In Chicago monitoring Twitter for reports of food poisoning led to 133 restaurant inspections for health violations, with 21 establishments shut down. Dina Fine Maron reports.

During a 10-month stretch last year, staff members at the health agency responded to 270 tweets about “food poisoning.” Based on those tweets, 193 complaints were filed and 133 restaurants in the city were inspected. Twenty-one were closed down and another 33 were forced to fix health violations. That’s according to a study in the journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.[Jenine K. Harris et al, Health Department Use of Social Media to Identify Foodborne Illness — Chicago, Illinois, 2013–2014]

Foodborne Chicago on MeatPoultry.com: EXCLUSIVE: Foodborne illness in the age of Twitter

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Here’s an article in a leading industry magazine about Foodborne Chicago. Snip:

An added benefit for public health agencies is that FoodBorne Chicago is an open-source framework, which will enable other health departments adopt the application free of charge, Harris said. Richardson said the cost of developing the FoodBorne Chicago program was “minimal between staff time and a few nominal costs for the server, the URL and things like that.”

Foodborne Chicago Covered in Food Poisoning Bulletin

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Here’s some  more coverage today from the food safety industry: New Twitter App Tracks Foodborne Illness Outbreaks in Chicago. Snip:

Food Poisoning BulletinWe’ve told you before about apps that can help keep you safe from food poisoning, and how Twitter may be playing a role in foodborne illess outbreak investigations. Now a company in Chicago has created a new Twitter app called Foodborne Chicago. The project is part of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, an organization “devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology.”

The app asks people who think they contracted food poisoning at a restaurant to fill out a form, which is sent to the Chicago Department of Public Health. The app also uses computer codes to search Twitter for anything relating to food poisoning in the Chicago area. People review the tweets and reply back to people who posted about them, asking them to fill out the web form. The form asks which restaurant the person believes is linked to the illness, what the person ate, and when they got sick.

Cory Nissen and Joe Olson in Food Safety News re: Foodborne Chicago

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More than 70 complaints have been submitted since Foodborne Chicago’s April launch, but not all submissions were driven through Twitter interactions.

“Outside of Twitter, a lot of people are finding this form randomly as a way of logging an incident of food poisoning,” said Cory Nissen, one of the app’s developers.

Nissen and Joe Olson, another developer behind the project, emphasized that a receptive and open city health department is needed to get a project such as Foodborne Chicago off the ground.

Full story on @foodsafetynews: Social Media Apps Use Twitter to Track Illness Outbreaks