Team's Qualifications
Problem Statement
Primary Users and Their Goals
How to Find Participants
Initial Design

Team's Qualifications

Florance Gee - Florance has taken courses in diverse areas such as systems management, software design, user interface design, multimedia, information policy, and health care management. Her professional experiences include database design/management and systems administration at Bay Area health care organizations. For the Healthy Communities Project, she will act as the documentation, and testing/evaluation manager. Her core competencies include programming, testing, and writing.
Ran Li - Ran has a bachelor's and master's degree in mechanical engineering. She has extensive experience in software engineering, web development, database administration, and information management. She will be the primary developer of the back end healthy community system and will act as the database and development manager. Her core competencies include database design, PHP, and HTML programming.
Nettie Ng - Nettie's coursework emphasizes systems analysis. She has experience in project management, and she will also be involved with needs assessment, user interface research and design. Her core competencies include scheduling, organization, and design. She will act as the project manager and design manager for Healthy Communities.

Problem Statement

In the Healthy People 2010 Report, the Department of Health and Human Services found that the four primary health influencers are:

Lifestyle - 50%
Environmental Factors - 20%
Genetic Factors - 20%
Medical Care - 10%

Life style and environment contribute to 70% of our health determinants, and both factors are largely influenced by community conditions and decisions made regarding that community. In this information age, we have seen patients increasingly becoming partners in their own health care, researching health information online and participating actively in clinical decisions with their providers. However, in the larger arena of public health, or community health, there is a lack of partnership and participation by the general public to improve community health. It is not that people don't care to improve the quality of life in their communities, but they lack the appropriate tools to become easily involved. Although professionals from areas such as public health, city planning, environmental planning, sanitation services, law enforcement, religion, and other fields work hard to improve community health, there is also a lack of coordination and sharing of information/resources among these professionals, making the effort even more difficult. What is needed is an information network that tracks community health issues, promotes sharing of community information and best practices, and supports tools to help people get involved in making community decisions.

Primary users and their goals development

The primary users for the site will be the general public who are interested in accessing reference information, making risk assessments, getting decision assistance, implementing decisions, and monitoring progress made over time. The site is a powerful tool that could help people become aware of and respond to conditions in their communities, as well as showing them how to effect healthy changes within their communities. Our site will serve as a template for different counties or regions to establish their own healthycities site. Our immediate clients will be private or public organizations or agencies that are interested in implementing such a tool in their county using our template. Currently a few organizations from California, Washington and New York have expressed interests in the project idea. End-users of the site could be ordinary citizens, professionals, researchers, government personnel, and so on.

How to Find Participants

Participants will include but not limited to each of the above categories. The final functionalities of our site will eventually determine the specific types of user we will have. Participants will be found through personal connections. Some possible use-case scanerios are: (1) A person who is relocating from out of state may use the site to learn about the rate and distribution of crime in a particular city so as to assist him/her to find the right location for residency. (2) People who want to offer and seek volunteering services within a community can connect each other through the system. (3) Government personnel may want to go to the site to find out residents' concerns or comments on certain city proposals/projects to help them prioritize policy-making process.

Initial Desgin

The Initial design includes three key components:

1. A dashboard that provides indicators and news to alert people to community health issues such as the increase or decrease in toxic releases within a community, or a change in residential crime statistics. This will increase local community health awareness.
2. A database of contacts and best and promising practices in fields that work to promote health and advance quality of life. This allows users to share what activities and interventions work in one community, and can be tried in another community.
3. A collection of information and communication tools which allows communities to plan, organize, make change, and evaluate changes. Examples include generating surveys, tracking legislation, and matching individuals with similar interests/expertise in community projects.

The system will have a front end and a back end. The front end will be built using PHP and HTML. Visualization and audio will be added where appropriate. The backend will consist of databases from MySQL. The system will be designed for user customization and to interface with different systems.

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