(2019-09-18) Hon S07e05 Leverage Meets Parks And Rec

Dan Hon s07e05: "Leverage-meets-Parks-and-Rec". In the (fictional!) user journey I’ve been working on, we’ve got an after-hours social worker heading out to a police station to pick up a kid and interview his mother

you’re not allowed to take anything in with you. No pen or pencil. No paper.

There is a ton of information you’re picking up in conversation - names, addresses, phone numbers, doctors, hopefully a family member who the poor kid can stay with because they’re not going home with mum that night. And all of this in a potentially hostile situation where you’re desperately trying to build rapport.

Anyway, the way systems work at the moment is all of this stuff says in the head of the social worker. As soon as they get out of the interview, they might be able to scribble some of this stuff down.

the long-form narrative only gets done when our social worker gets back to the office, has a few minutes, and then starts typing it up.

It’s because a government function like child welfare is administered

structured, relevant information that could be acted upon is only really stored in the unstructured text narrative. Little Charlie has a bee sting allergy and needs an epi-pen? Goes in the narrative.

There’s two kinds of data here, and I think we’ve only really got systems for the first kind.

First, we’ve got admin-based, task-based, workflow-based systems

So you’ve got a second system. A longitudinal, immutable datastore attached to a person. Everything that you find out about that person, at whatever point in time, ideally captured in a structured format, and recordable in under 1-2 seconds. Not, I don’t think, a “medical notes” section.


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