San Jose is working with Austin and Travis County, Texas — and private-sector partners Accenture, Adobe, Alliance for Innovation, Globant, NuHarbor, Oracle, Splunk and Whyline — on a COVID-19 National Testing-Data-Response Platform. The initiative began in mid-March, San Jose CIO Rob Lloyd said Tuesday during the weekly “In Case You Missed It (ICYMI)” gov tech webcast on LinkedIn featuring e.Republic Chief Innovation Officer Dustin Haisler and Joe Morris, vice president of research at e.Republic.* Slides revealed goals of finishing the minimum viable product (MVP) that month and moving toward scaling adoption in early April. The city is also working with the states of California, Illinois, Michigan, New Hampshire, Texas and Utah to determine whether they may wish to join the nonprofit partnership. Among the takeaways:
• The collaboration grew out of a number of contacts from vendors and the possibilities of help in testing, dashboards, public engagement and even supply management for personal protective equipment (PPE). City officials realized they had roughly three or four weeks to shape the impact of this disease on communities and craft a complete solution capable of informing the public and offering them a resource for better health outcomes — but powered internally by the data and the insights to make better decisions and actions.
• The project is aimed at managing testing both on the public-facing side and in administration of testing sites, and enabling data flow to bring perspective to a refined health response.
“Because if we have analysis and information and then we can translate that into patterns and insights then we can cross the fulcrum to actually value through data which is better decisions and actions, prediction and programmatic response,” Lloyd said. A partnership, he emphasized, is key throughout.
• The goal is crafting a platform capable of delivering immediate help and near-real-time data in moments of need, founded on community-based information and built with secure and expansive technologies, and which can potentially scale nationwide and address needs in nutrition and assist special needs populations.
And potentially, by relying on a group of vendors, the finished product can reflect everyone’s strengths.
• The question has been how to rearrange assets and work to best support cities’ needs in the immediate sense. Operationally, San Jose has had to address transitioning around 7,000 employees to working remote; and processing reach-outs from companies and nonprofits offering assistance.
• Asked by Haisler for advice to the industry on how best to engage with state and local leaders, Lloyd said the connection points will likely vary depending on the offering. A government’s emergency operations center and its logistics chief could be the first points of contact, the CIO said. But for “profound gives” or large donations, a mayor or city manager could be the appropriate contacts, while a government’s CIO or chief innovation officer might be more suitable to contact for tactical or technology matters.
*e.Republic is Techwire’s parent company.
