Health

Kyla Williams promoted to Director of Operations

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Kyla Williams has been promoted to Smart Chicago’s Director of Operations. Kyla has been an integral part of Smart Chicago’s work helping to manage our finances, contracts, and grants. Kyla also runs all of our health initiatives including the Chicago Health Atlas and the Smart Health Centers.

Smart Chicago will be taking on more projects in 2015 and Kyla’s new role will be to help manage all of our operations going forward and will continue to spearhead our health initiatives.

You can follow Kyla on Twitter at @SmartChgoKyla.

Launch of Chicago Health Atlas 3.0

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Last week we launched our third major update to our Chicago Health Atlas project.  This is the most robust version of the Atlas released since its debut in 2012. The Atlas is funded and receives significant thought leadership from the Otho S. A. Sprague Memorial Institute. Sprague, and their Executive Director Jim Alexander, has shepherded this program for years.

Chicago Health Atlas, along with all of our other health products like Foodborne Chicago and Smart Health Centers, is managed by Smart Chicago Director of Operations Kyla Williams with lots of help from Program Coordinator Sonja Marziano.

Chicago Health Atlas 1.0

Chicago Health Atlas 1.0

The first version of the Atlas was a simple lookup tool for existing data. DataMade, a local firm that builds custom visualizations, deploys civic apps, and trains people to work with open data, has been an essential tech partner all the way through to this version. The site is based on the Derek Eder’s wildly influential and immensely useful Searchable Map Template. Derek was also important in helping me move from the Weave (Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment) platform and set up a structure that met Smart Chicago’s vision for the site.

Last year we conducted a CUTgroup test on the Atlas and found that users were a little confused with the original navigation.

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Rakesh Dubbudu: My stay with Smart Chicago Collaborative

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Editor’s Note: The following post is from our international fellow Rakesh Dubbudu. Rakesh spent a few weeks with us learning about civic innovation in Chicago. Rakesh works as an open data advocate in India as one of the co-conveners of the National Committee for People’s Right to Information.

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Before I arrived in the USA, I was unsure of the learning & exchange during this trip. Though my interest centered on good & effective governance using technology & data, I was unclear about the specifics. During the orientation in Washington DC, I came to know that I would spend three weeks in Chicago with the ‘Smart Chicago Collaborative’. It was time for a quick google search to check what Smart Chicago was doing. I understood a little about Smart Chicago’s work.

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Cook County Burial Locations Featured on WBEZ

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On October 27, Cook County Chief Medical Examiner was on WBEZ’s Afternoon Shift talking about their burial data. 

The data set  lists the final disposition sites of the indigents buried by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. Currently, there are two places where this happens. Homewood Memorial Gardens Cemetery (which provides Latitude and Longitude coordinates for burials) and Mount Olivet (which provides Grave, Lot, and Block locations.)

homewood

The data set provides the name, age, sex, race, date of death, and case number for each person buried by Cook County.

Our consultant, Josh Kalov worked with the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office to help set up the tables for the data set. He then educated the Medical Examiner’s office on how to upload data to the portal and made the first initial upload.

You can listen to the WBEZ story here. 

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.”

Chicago Region’s Civic Innovation Community at the Code for America Summit!

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This week is a great week for civic innovation—the Code for America Summit in San Francisco is here. Smart Chicago will be there in force. I will be there, as well as consultants Christopher Whitaker and Josh Kalov. (Along with about a dozen other representatives from Chicago’s civic hacking community)

2013_1015_071337 CfASummit

We’ll be live tweeting the event on our @SmartChicago account, but you can also follow along using the #CfAsummit hashtag. Below the fold, we’ve all the details of the Chicago area delegation.

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Kyla Williams on WBEZ Tech Shift, Talking Chicago Health Atlas

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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.

Complete Data Set of Medicare Payments to Doctors and Suppliers in Chicago

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cms-logoOn 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.

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The New Chicago Health Atlas

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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:

atlasv2resources

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