Page 43 - GCN, Oct/Nov 2017

The horticulture industry, like any other, has regulations it must follow. To ensure that those rules are enforced, a team of 35 inspectors monitor the 9,000 loca- tions in New York state where plants and flowers are grown or sold.
A new mobile application is helping those inspectors do their jobs more ef- ficiently. The Plant Inspections mobile application, launched earlier this year, digitizes a process that was previously done on paper. The app is loaded on iPads issued to inspectors, where it syncs with a backend licensing system and automatically updates inspection records. It also auto-fills federal forms that are provided as PDFs.
In introducing the app, Department of Agriculture and Markets Commis- sioner Richard Ball said, “By increas- ing efficiency, our inspectors are able to provide more detailed and thorough reports to plant growers and deal-
ers across the state, which will also help us better support and protect the industry.”
The New York State Office of Infor- mation Technology Services worked closely with inspectors throughout the process of developing the app by ob- serving their activities in the field and meeting with them in person.
State officials say the app has led
to a drastic reduction in paper use, and there are already plans for adding features. And they are looking into other departments that could benefit from a similar app for other kinds of inspections.
Finalist
A mobile, multimedia, real- time traffic center
Caltrans QuickMap
California Department of Transportation
The California Department of Transpor- tation is no newcomer to sharing traffic information with the public. It has being
doing it for decades through the Caltrans Highway Information Network, and as technology has improved, Caltrans has kept pace.
The latest way for residents to get information on travel conditions is via a mobile application, the Caltrans Quick- Map.
Paul Allen, a data processing manager in the Caltrans IT Department, said officials are always looking for ways to provide information in an easily consum- able fashion, and a mobile app was the obvious next step.
Users can find out how quickly traf-
fic is moving on state highways, check camera feeds for real-time conditions, see lane closures and the location of forest fires, and keep up with the requirements for tire chains on some roads during winter weather. They can also receive incident notifications from Waze.
The data comes from a variety of sources, including the California High- way Patrol, the state’s traffic-monitoring centers, Google and Waze.
Caltrans officials are already plan- ning to add more features to the mobile application. They would like to connect it to Google’s application programming interface for route planning so that mo- torists can get directions within the app. And they plan to provide the location of snow plows, which will be outfitted with GPS transponders, so users can follow the progress of plowing and find out how close their street is to being cleared.
The app is even drawing international interest, with drivers in Canada and Mexico downloading it as they plan trips through the state.
Finalist
From technically available to truly useful
Access to Care
Department of Veterans Affairs
Following a public outcry over how long veterans often wait to receive
medical care, the Department of Vet- erans Affairs has been driving toward greater transparency — a goal the Access to Care tool meets.
“It was not [a question of] ‘how can this help the VA?’” said Jack Bates, director of VA’s Business Intelligence Service Line. “It was ‘how can this help the veterans?’”
The tool lets veterans and their families view the wait times at VA facilities, compare care ratings and review national data on access. It pulls data from 130 components of VA’s VistA electronic health records system into a data mart built for the project.
“We in turn feed that data to a mir- ror system in Microsoft Azure Govern- ment, which is where the application resides and accesses the data in the data mart,” Bates said. The tool also uses Bing Maps to show facilities’ locations.
The data had long been available publicly but mainly in a massive, infrequently updated PDF file that users had to download and search. Now, users can enter ZIP codes or addresses, set a search radius, choose an appointment and clinic type, and sort results by distance, facility name or wait time. The results pop up on a map alongside facility details.
Soon, users will also be able to search for providers based on spe- cialty and gender.
“It’s giving veterans access to the same data that we have on the same frequency that we get it,” Bates said.
Shereef Elnahal, VA’s assistant deputy undersecretary for health for quality, safety and value, credits a strong partnership between the
IT and business teams for the tool’s success.
“We were able to bring this product online within just a month,” Elnahal said. “This is a case study for how seamlessly you can translate busi- ness requirements into an IT product within government.”
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