How the Chicago Department of Public Health advances Healthy Chicago through technology. Presented by Commissioner Choucair at the APHA 2013 Annual Meeting Code-A-Thon
I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to speak with you today about public health in Chicago. First, I’ll briefly introduce the Chicago Public Health Agenda, the blueprint for our work to make Chicago the healthiest city in the nation. Next, I’ll talk about the indicators that we’ve developed to monitor the progress of our efforts, and how we developed them. Finally, I’ll talk about how CDPH and our partners are using data, metrics and technology to improve public health.
Mayor Emanuel and CDPH released the Healthy Chicago Agenda in August 2011. The Agenda identifies 12 priority areas, health status targets for 2020, and 193 strategies to meet our goals. The strategies cover areas of policy, programs, and education and awareness activities. By working on strategies in all these areas, the goals are addressed comprehensively. Healthy Chicago is also a shift from one-time programmatic interventions to sustainable system, policy and environmental changes. Policy, Systems, and Environmental Change is a relatively new way of thinking in public health. Healthy Chicago is changing the environment in Chicago to make healthy choices practical and available to all community members. By changing laws and shaping physical landscapes, a big and sustainable impact can be made with little time and few resources. This type of work engages diverse stakeholders, because we are exerting public health leadership where people live, play, and work.
Healthy Chicago lays out strategies for addressing 12 public health priorities, which are:
Partnerships have been key to the Healthy Chicago successes we’ve seen thus far. On this slide are many of the agencies we work with on Healthy Chicago priorities – Hospitals, community development corporations, public agencies, FQHC’s, universities, businesses and more – have all played an important role.
I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to speak with you today about public health in Chicago. First, I’ll briefly introduce the Chicago Public Health Agenda, the blueprint for our work to make Chicago the healthiest city in the nation. Next, I’ll talk about the indicators that we’ve developed to monitor the progress of our efforts, and how we developed them. Finally, I’ll talk about how CDPH and our partners are using data, metrics and technology to improve public health.
It starts with a city-wide plan.
Pitched by CDPH and Tom Kompare created the flu app.
I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to speak with you today about public health in Chicago. First, I’ll briefly introduce the Chicago Public Health Agenda, the blueprint for our work to make Chicago the healthiest city in the nation. Next, I’ll talk about the indicators that we’ve developed to monitor the progress of our efforts, and how we developed them. Finally, I’ll talk about how CDPH and our partners are using data, metrics and technology to improve public health.
Another strategy of Healthy Chicago is to increase the availability of public health data through the City’s website.To that end, we now make use of the City’s Open Data Portal to push out frequent updates of indicator data related to births, deaths, infectious diseases, environmental health, hospital discharges, and public health assets.The way it works, we don’t provide any data directly to the Chicago Health Atlas website; the developers subscribe to our feed on the Data Portal, and can update their views with new data as it becomes available.
Flu App Example using data portal flu vaccination sites. Now 4 different retail clinics joined the app with us.
FoodBorneChi is an example of Technology supporting Healthy Chicago that complements current telephone reporting using 311. It uses Twitter as a sentinel to search for mentions of “food poisoning.” In order to determine if a tweet is relevant to the city's interests, it must be classified as relevant or noise. This classification is done via machine learning. In this process, a mathematical, natural language model is constructed using existing tweets and a human classifier.
Flu App Example using data portal flu vaccination sites. Now 4 different retail clinics joined the app with us.
Once the model is completely built, future tweets can be applied to the model, resulting in automatic classification. When a tweet is classified correctly, it then becomes actionable, and can be routed to the proper municipal department. Currently, we have completed 50 inspections through this app. Future uses can include emergency preparedness, disease outbreaks, etc.
The steps a resident goes through to report a suspected food poisoning incident are easy. When users respond to our Twitter @-reply;They fill out a simple food poisoning report form on Foodborne. This form is submitted to the City of Chicago via its Open311 interface. This submission is equivalent to the person calling Chicago 311 to report their food poisoning.The 311 software routes the submission to the Chicago Department of Public Health, where investigators review the submission and take action, including conducting inspections, based on the report.The inspection in detail is also updated into the Data Portal.
FoodBorneChicago is on Twitter @foodbornchi and the website is at foodbornechicago.org