Page 43 - GCN, October/November 2018

PROJECT: Electronic Access to VA Medical Images and Reports Department of Veterans Affairs
PROJECT: Violent Criminal Apprehension Program FBI
PROJECT: Virtual Situation Room City of Independence, Ore.
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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.”
The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) isn’t new, but the cloud has given it a makeover worthy of a witness protection program.
Rather than replacing a tool built on
a now-unsupported solution, Program Manager Nathan Graham and his team decided to revamp it, move it to the cloud and switch to open-source Elasticsearch technology.
ViCAP helps 2,500 users identify and
stop violent serial criminals by linking seemingly unconnected crimes. Graham said the program is gaining a new graphical user interface, improved search capabilities, integrated geospatial search and analysis, interactive timelines and anomaly detection.
“Let’s say the crime analyst searches a set of cases for unidentified remains in a state, and that some significant portion of the cases have a unique weapon as evidence,” he said. “That anomaly would be made visible as an unasked theme. The analyst did not ask. The crime analyst could pin the query, and when additional cases involving evidence of that type occur, the system alerts.”
The bureau applied an extract, transform, load process to update ViCAP and hired part-time subject-matter experts to produce a prototype in six weeks. It was built using an Elasticsearch instance created in Amazon Web Services’ GovCloud that pulls data from ViCAP’s Oracle database and transforms it for compatibility with Elasticsearch so that it can be formatted for querying, reporting and visualization.
For now, a 32-bit Microsoft FAST Search Server is still in play, but the Oracle database is scheduled to be updated by AWS while Graham makes more tweaks before moving a minimally upgraded version of the tool into production.
Unsurprisingly, the city of Independence, Ore., goes all out on the nation’s birthday, hosting a four-day event that doubles its population of about 10,000. Management of the celebration has largely been left to volunteers, but this year, they got some digital help.
“Our problem was how do we most effectively deploy staff during this very large event where it’s just madness and craziness, and how do we keep track of all the information?” said Jason Kistler, the city’s IT manager.
The answer was the WiseTown Situation Room, an event management tool created by the city and software development company TeamDev. Kistler likened it to a computer- aided dispatch system. During the event, the tool automatically ingested real-time traffic information, surveillance video and geo- referenced social media posts and shared them on a central dashboard.
“We had an app that ran on all volunteers’ smartphones [and] all city staff smartphones, and that enabled us to track their locations within the event,” Kistler said. “When an issue would come up, we could assign the nearest person...who was available.”
The city also used internet-of-things technology to monitor the crowds and collect demographic information. Using sensors at the entrance gates, officials could track the number of people entering and leaving, along with their age groups and genders.
It was a vast improvement over operations in the past. “Usually, volunteers are just running around putting out fires that they see,” Kistler said.
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