Digital Philadelphia: what it is, where it’s going and why you need to get involved

Two years ago this May, the City’s Digital Philadelphia initiative bore public birth. Some movement has been made and details secured, but what can we expect to come?

In front of 75 people at a Refresh Philly gathering in May 2009, then City of Philadelphia Chief Information Officer Allan Frank introduced an IT overhaul plan that would receive unprecedented city funding. The specifics were fuzzy then, but that summer Mayor Nutter signed an executive order that put Frank in charge of every piece of IT in the city’s gaze and there were growing budget plans, including the six-year $120 million IT capital budget authorized that year.

“My goal is for Philadelphia to be ground zero for the road map of moving an industrial city to the knowledge economy,” Frank told Technically Philly before leaving office.

What was meant to follow the incomplete Wireless Philadelphia initiative, became a platform on which Frank could fawn over the biggest and boldest plans. Those plans became the foundation of his legacy, the public face of on-going internal IT upgrade needs. By November 2010, weeks before his announced resignation, during public appearances Frank had his Digital Philadelphia pitch down pat, in three neat categories:

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Fox Chase Cancer Center begins posting clincal outcomes data

Philadelphia Business Journal on a data-driven sales pitch from the Fox Chase Cancer Center:

Fox Chase Cancer Center began posting its clinical outcomes data to its website Monday as a tool to assist newly diagnosed patients in deciding where to seek cancer care.

Albert Einstein uses real-time tracking system to save lives, cash

If the guy who said “what gets measured gets managed” stepped foot into Albert Einstein Medical Center he would have been a happy man.

The Logan-based hospital has been using a Real-Time Location System (RTLS) that monitors and measures the location of doctors, medical devices and patients since last September, according to RIFD Journal, but the North Broad Street fixture has just released their first round of related metrics.

What Twitter is to your friends’ eating habits, the RTLS is to medicine.

Each patient who comes through the hospital is given one of the 350 special ID cards that gets synced with the patient’s medical file. The devices act as a GPS of sorts, relaying the location of the wearer to receivers throughout the hospital which transmit the data over a local area network to a computer running special software. Hospital employees can pull up the building’s floor plan and see in real-time where patients and co-workers are and how long they have been there.

Doctors no longer have to go searching for equipment (and each other), while the time patients spend waiting around to be treated is being cut down.

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