Page 42 - FCW, November, December 2018

Public Sector Innovations
PROJECT: StormSense
Commonwealth Center for Recurrent Flooding Resiliency
Better warnings as Virginia waters rise
In 2016, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science launched the StormSense program to track water level rise in Virginia’s Hampton Roads area. Today, there is a network of 28 sensors in Norfolk, Virginia Beach and Newport News, made available with funding from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The sensors track flooding conditions and report back to VIMS, which has created an Alexa skills app that informs residents about water levels throughout the region. The information is also displayed via a cloud-based platform that incorporates Esri’s mapping and visualization tools.
“We continue to add functionality to the app to report the water levels for the StormSense gauges, [U.S. Geological Survey] gauges and now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration gauges as well,” said Derek Loftis, program manager for StormSense. “We’ve been adding to our Amazon Alexa chatbot to answer inquiries.”
There is also an ongoing process with the local branch of the National Weather Service to generate alerts based on the gauge readings. Modeled on VIMS’ Tidewatch network, which predicts flooding 36 hours in advance, the alerts could help residents better prepare for flooding in the region.
In addition, Loftis said he hopes to incorporate data from 75 to 80 sensors maintained by a regional sanitation district by the end of the year.
“The data architecture is there to add the extra sensors, but there are not public [application programming interfaces] to link on an individual gauge basis,” he added. “We are extremely interested in those measuring devices so it is not just water-level sensors in the network.”
PROJECT: Electronic Access to VA Medical Images and Reports Department of Veterans Affairs
High-speed delivery of
critical health data
A new feature of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ My HealtheVet portal gives veterans almost immediate access to their medical images and reports.
“Previously, veterans were required to submit a written request to get copies of their X-rays or MRIs, and then that was manually processed, and that request could take up to 20 days for a veteran to get a physical copy of their results,” said Theresa Hancock, director of the My HealtheVet National Program Office. “The problems we were trying to solve were ease of access, timeliness and reducing stress on the patient.”
Veterans can now log onto the site to request images and receive low-resolution thumbnail copies along with associated radiology reports. They can also ask for a Zip file containing the full-resolution images and reports. Because those files can take awhile to download, users can ask to be notified via email when the files are ready.
Veterans can also download a free
viewer to see the images and save them to a personal cloud service, such as iCloud or a Dropbox, so they can easily share documents when they have an urgent care visit or appointment with a specialist.
Between the feature’s release in April and the end of August, almost 231,000 requests were made via the portal, and nearly 870,000 reports were viewed.
The solution “addressed ease of access because it’s available electronically to download,” Hancock said. “It addressed timeliness because it’s anywhere, anytime, 24/7 through self-serve. And it addressed stress on the patient because it eliminates wait time and travel time and costs.”
42 November/December 2018 FCW.COM