OPEN LEGISLATR

THE OPEN WAY TO TRACK CHANGING HEALTHCARE LEGISLATION

A Project by Code for America’s Houston Brigade

@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.orgSunday, March 24, 13

OVERVIEWThe Problem & Our SolutionDemo of ApplicationMarket PotentialUsefulness/Applicability

Level of technical and user design

OPEN LEGISLATR

@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.orgSunday, March 24, 13

THE PROBLEMNo Way to Track Changes in Texas Legislation

@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.orgSunday, March 24, 13

Imagine you are interested in keeping track of changes to a healthcare bill in the Texas Legislature. How do you do this? Currently this process is really painful and looks like this...

CURRENTLY, WHEN A BILL’S STATUS CHANGES - YOU HAVE TO INITIATE A

NEW SEARCH

@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.orgSunday, March 24, 13

http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/resources/FollowABill.aspx

The site explains how to follow a bill - their instructions direct you to a new URL or notification system/calendar for each of the different status changes.

Currently, each time there is a status change in a Bill, anyone trying to follow those updates has to seek a new information source to find out what’s new.

OPEN LEGISLATR SENDS YOU THE LATEST

STATUS UPDATES

@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.orgSunday, March 24, 13

Open Legislatr is going change that and make it easier for you to track bill changes by sending status changes and the key information about those changes directly to you, in real time.

DEMO SLIDE

@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.org

http://openlegislatr.org/

Sunday, March 24, 13

As compared to the option of entering your own custom search or specify the Bill you want to track, look at how the current search is set-up - http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/Reports/BillsBySubject.aspx?ID=subject&LegSess=83R&Cat=I

(It’s painful - you’ve been warned)

MARKET AUDIENCE

JournalistsHealthcare Professionals Lobbyists/ PACsEducational Institutes/ISDsPharmaceuticalInsurance/MedicareLawyers

@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.orgSunday, March 24, 13

All of these groups of people have an ongoing need for up to date healthcare legislation data in order to

make informed decisions, forecast and prepare for industry changes, and educate the public and

politicians about key issues.

HOW WE’RE DIFFERENT...

@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.orgSunday, March 24, 13

• value proposition/competitive advantage

no one else let’s you search by topics

none track the trends in most popular Bills, most tweeted/socially shared

STRATEGY

@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.orgSunday, March 24, 13

The Plan for Expanding and Growing our User Base:

Use Code for America’s Network of Cities to Integrate More State Legislation Data through API’s, and

Continue Development of the App plus gather the data on

* the most popular Bills by keywords

*analytics on who’s influential on twitter and other social networks

* what key trends in state legislation changes are occurring online

WE ALL NEED UP-TO-DATE LEGISLATION DATA

@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.orgSunday, March 24, 13

Usefulness/Applicability:

* relevance to health tech - changes in health related legislation helps keep the public better informed

and helps healthcare industry experts track relevant legal changes and trends so they can make better

decisions.

* would the target audience actually use it? - Definitely - the user experience was ultimately our focus

in designing the search tools and the information feed on the front end. On the back end, the data

we’re tracking on search phrases most commonly used, Bills viewed, and social engagement and

influencers segmented by topic/Bill is invaluable to understanding voter interest in different legislative

issues.

* does this tech take into consideration challenges specific to health tech? 

every day there is a group protesting outside the capital - they all need up to date information

OPEN SOURCE ON GITHUB@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.org

http://openstates.org/api/

Sunday, March 24, 13

Level of technical and user design:

integration of technical components (APIs and datasets)

- tumblr and Ruby on Rails

- RSS feeds

- API datasets: currently just the Open States API by the Sunlight Foundation, but we’ve built backend

functionality into the app that makes it easy to plug in additional API’s to expand or customize to pull

in the data sets specifically wanted by different states and legislative topics.

degree of function/completeness - about 80% complete right now

Ways we’ve improved User Experience from the competition:

• better search tools (mentioned earlier)

• RSS feeds of each Bill and the changes

• User can subscribe to receive notifications for a specific Bill and track changes, pass/fail, votes, and

more

THE TEAM

Paul KwiatkowskiApplication Developer

Sarah M WorthyUser Experience

Gerald A. RichProject Lead

Peter DarkeData Architect

Sunday, March 24, 13

We all do other things and these are our roles with developing Open Legislatr

THANK YOU!

http://openlegislatr.org/

OPEN LEGISLATR

@OpenTXLege

@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.orgSunday, March 24, 13