Month: November 2016

These are the six presentations made by the teams at the conclusion of Code The City 7, Health Hack, captured on periscope.tv.

Team Float My Boat

An enhanced prototype has been created, with plans to create a more complete version. Using postcodes and mapping it would be straightforward to consume good data from elsewhere if available.

Some community centres and churches have over 100 groups operating at some point in the month. They can be hugely valuable, but somewhat invisible to the internet. Just making the existence of many of these groups visible can be a big step.

Also discussion of the importance of occupational therapists, librarians, dog walkers – many different individuals in the community that can feed valuable information into this kind of platform – important to remember that it’s not just primary care data that matters.

https://www.periscope.tv/w/1gqxvRgODoexB

Some interesting visualisations of the underlying data were also created, and led to some interesting discussions around assumptions that are made about data. Again, the value of having the experts in the room at a hack event was demonstrated, as assumptions were challenged, and analysis changed based on feedback. Such feedback can often take weeks to acquire – but was available during the presentation. A snapshot of the data is available on github, and you can see the visualisation here.

https://www.periscope.tv/w/1dRKZRLnErbKB

Team Text

The team have a working prototype, with functioning logic to query the Aliss dataset and return three results vis SMS. Pulling json data from Aliss based on a query generated from the SMS exchange, and sending those results.

The team say that there is still work to do to make this production ready, and some of the language processing and logic could be improved – but getting a working prototype over the course of the weekend is a real achievement. You can see elements of the code on github.

https://www.periscope.tv/watty62/1nAKEkZeAqXJL?

Team Pomoc

The team have created a video prototype, which looks great. The full Polish translation is complete, and will be added to the video using youtube closed captions, as well as an audio overlay later.

The project is to be presented to a group of GPs later this week for feedback as to usefulness and likely impact. Code, and scripts, are posted to the team github page.

https://www.periscope.tv/watty62/1vAGRXqNVBaxl?

Team Delta Test

The limiting factor for this team has been the size of the datasets that they are working with, and the speed at which these can be moved around. Despite early setbacks with port access through the wifi (something we’re working on for the next weekend) the team were able to show some real results for the final presentation.

Some interesting findings around the geotagging, and inconsistencies that can arise. Some really interesting possible extensions to the project were discussed. The plan is to take this project ‘back to the office’ as the prototype for a full roll out to help optimise the use of lab support for GPs.

https://www.periscope.tv/watty62/1kvJpqRjjzMxE?

Team Friend Tree

This team found that overlaps between their objectives and those of other teams were significant, so concentrated on some of the more ‘marketing’ aspects of service delivery – identity, and some thoughts around messaging to bring people into the service.

A good example of a service that could be rolled out quickly on top of the kind of datasets being used by the Float your boat project.

https://www.periscope.tv/watty62/1eaKblAmPdnJX?

Great progress overnight and through the morning. Very few drop outs overnight – keeping a real energy in the room.

Float your boat

The team have created a prototype website focusing on helping people find events and services locally. Includes stories about people improving their lives through accessing services.

Currently acting as a central hub for finding further information.

Have discussed turning it into an app, but clearly a web first approach seems the most appropriate at this stage. Discussion about the potential for local community ownership, or for a body like Health Partnership Development to take the lead.

A key observation was that the scope of ambition for the project has jumped from very ambitious and broad, to much tighter, and back again multiple times. Deciding on the scope to tackle took significant time, and was acknowledged as key to making progress.

Worth noting that the team is treating the sourcing and management of high quality data to be a parallel problem, likely tackled elsewhere.

Friends Tree

The team has a paper prototype app aiming to guide people towards independently finding a way to take part in the local community.

Similar to the Float’ project, but focussed more tightly on social isolation issues and solutions.

They have been looking at the scoring, rating and categorisation of services and activities to aid in selection and guide people towards appropriate choices.

This team agreed with the importance of selecting a specific objective for the project – and to focus on that. Very easy to get distracted by related issues.

The unique element identified in the group discussion was the potential to allow the creation of some small groups. A fascinating example was the creation of a ‘take the bins out’ agreement among neighbours – helping people find help if they are away from home, and easing a ‘first contact’ event with new neighbours when you move home.

Delta Test

While the team ‘have nothing fancy to show’ they have made substantial progress since the last update, and are confident of having a well progressed project by the end of the day. Work has progressed on three fronts:

Data collection and insertion to new database.

Reporting layer, where work if focussed on generating mean values for overview presentation.

The Geo team have been translating postcodes into coordinates, and creating workflows and automation to allow this to happen as time goes on when new data and boundary changes happen.

An interesting discussion about availability of data about GP practices, (there is more than you might think, much of which can be reviewed here) and what can be done with it.

Pomoc

The language barrier project has focussed on refining the story told in the video and literature that it is creating. The discussion touched on the existing use of mobile phones as a primary translation tool for many people with English as a second language, especially when confronted with technical or medical terms.

Also discussed options to not only offer better translation access, but to offer language skills development services as a preferred approach.

Team text

This team have met a couple of technical barriers when tying their various elements together, but have achieved a number of key elements.

SMS messages are being relayed successfully.

A prototype of the service has been created in Java to simulate the interaction, on screen for now rather than by SMS.

Discussion has been primarily around the importance of marketing and communications around the service. Targeting of publicity thought to centre on food banks, shelters, pubs, chemists, community centres – all places with high footfall from the demographic groups the service would be most appropriate for.

The wider group identified this as a key tool in self management of long term issues, and something that would have a genuine impact.

Data visualisation

Finally, a demonstration of some visualisation options using off the shelf visualisation tools to gain insights into the quality, coverage and usefulness of a data set.

View the visualisation here.

Discussion around the demonstration identified the usefulness of the geographical visualisations in identifying differences and gaps in service levels from area to area.