Encompass
Bayes Impact, Product Manager
2017-2018
Focus Areas
Civic technology, healthcare, GIS, data science, nonprofit
Skill Set
Policy and market research, business development, data analysis, wire framing, UI/UX design, prototyping, data visualization
Background
After working with the California Department of Managed Healthcare (DMHC) to improve their population model for auditing the network coverage of health insurance plans across the state, the Bayes Impact team realized that many other public agencies might have similar needs for population mapping to help illuminate accessibility challenges of public services at large.
Existing tools used to map social services against the location of general populations are prohibitively expensive, require significant amounts of manual data processing, and are too coarse to accurately depict accessibility issues. We set out to build a solution that eliminates those barriers by applying modern geospatial algorithms, packaging them up into a demo application, and open-sourcing the code base to invite feedback.
The resulting application is named Encompass, and serves as an analytics and mapping tool that equips policymakers, researchers, and consumer advocates with data to make informed policy and implementation decisions to improve the equity and accessibility of social services to disadvantaged populations.
Responsibilities
Led product strategy and market research on health care network adequacy policies, tools and regulatory trends
Wireframed and designed user interface
Managed team of data scientists and engineers to develop population and routing algorithm
Selected sample data sets to demonstrate use cases, such as gaps in abortion clinic access and substance abuse treatment services
Networked and demoed application to potential funders, researchers and state agencies
Results
Released public-facing application and open-sourced underlying algorithms to promote transparency, spark dialogue and invite feedback
Learnings
Policy and analysis tools are challenging to fund and scale without relevant government regulations to promote demand
Research grants would have been a promising avenue to pursue in partnership with universities, nonprofits, and industry think tanks