Doctors’ Individual Opioid Prescription ‘Report Cards’ Show Impact

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Scott Calvert at the Wall Street Journal: “Several states, including Arizona, Kentucky and Ohio, are using their state prescription monitoring databases to send doctors individualized “report cards” that show how their prescribing of addictive opioids and other drugs compares with their peers.

“Arizona probably has the most complete one out there right now—it’s pretty impressive,” said Patrick Knue, director of the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Training and Technical Assistance Center at Brandeis University, which helps states improve their databases.

Arizona’s quarterly reports rate a doctor’s prescribing of oxycodone and certain other drugs as normal, high, severe or extreme compared with the state’s other doctors in his medical specialty.

During a two-year pilot program, the number of opiate prescriptions fell 10% in five counties while rising in other counties, said Dean Wright, former head of the state’s prescription-monitoring program. The report cards also contributed to a 4% drop in overdose deaths in the pilot counties, he said.

The state now issues the report cards statewide and in June sent notices to more than 13,000 doctors statewide. Mr. Wright said the message is clear: “Stop and think about what you’re prescribing and the impact it can have.”
The report cards list statistics such as how many of a doctor’s patients received controlled substances from five or more doctors. Elizabeth Dodge, Mr. Wright’s successor, said some doctors ask for the patients’ names—information they might have gleaned from the database….(More)”

Open data, transparency and accountability

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Topic guide by Liz Carolan: “…introduces evidence and lessons learned about open data, transparency and accountability in the international development context. It discusses the definitions, theories, challenges and debates presented by the relationship between these concepts, summarises the current state of open data implementation in international development, and highlights lessons and resources for designing and implementing open data programmes.

Open data involves the release of data so that anyone can access, use and share it. The Open DataCharter (2015) describes six principles that aim to make data easier to find, use and combine:

  • open by default
  • timely and comprehensive
  • accessible and usable
  • comparable and interoperable
  • for improved governance and citizen engagement
  • for inclusive development and innovation

One of the main objectives of making data open is to promote transparency.

Transparency is a characteristic of government, companies, organisations and individuals that are open in the clear disclosure of information, rules, plans, processes and actions. Trans­parency of information is a crucial part of this. Within a development context, transparency and accountability initiatives have emerged over the last decade as a way to address developmental failures and democratic deficits.

There is a strong intersection between open data and transparency as concepts, yet as fields of study and practice, they have remained somewhat separate. This guide draws extensively on analysis and evidence from both sets of literature, beginning by outlining the main concepts and the theories behind the relationships between them.

Data release and transparency are parts of the chain of events leading to accountability.  For open data and transparency initiatives to lead to accountability, the required conditions include:

  • getting the right data published, which requires an understanding of the politics of data publication
  • enabling actors to find, process and use information, and to act on any outputs, which requires an accountability ecosystem that includes equipped and empowered intermediaries
  • enabling institutional or social forms of enforceability or citizens’ ability to choose better services,which requires infrastructure that can impose sanctions, or sufficient choice or official support for citizens

Programmes intended to increase access to information can be impacted by and can affect inequality. They can also pose risks to privacy and may enable the misuse of data for the exploitation of individuals and markets.

Despite a range of international open data initiatives and pressures, developing countries are lagging behind in the implementation of reforms at government level, in the overall availability of data, and in the use of open data for transparency and accountability. What is more, there are signs that ‘open-washing’ –superficial efforts to publish data without full integration with transparency commitments – may be obscuring backsliding in other aspects of accountability.

The topic guide pulls together lessons and guidance from open data, transparency and accountability work,including an outline of technical and non-technical aspects of implementing a government open data initiative. It also lists further resources, tools and guidance….(More)”

Data Driven Governments: Creating Value Through Open Government Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Chapter by Judie Attard , Fabrizio Orlandi and Sören Auer in Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems XXVII: “Governments are one of the largest producers and collectors of data in many different domains and one major aim of open government data initiatives is the release of social and commercial value. Hence, we here explore existing processes of value creation on government data. We identify the dimensions that impact, or are impacted by value creation, and distinguish between the different value creating roles and participating stakeholders. We propose the use of Linked Data as an approach to enhance the value creation process, and provide a Value Creation Assessment Framework to analyse the resulting impact. We also implement the assessment framework to evaluate two government data portals….(More)”

Big Data and Public Policy: Can It Succeed Where E-Participation Has Failed?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jonathan Bright and Helen Margetts at Policy & Society: “This editorial introduces a special issue resulting from a panel on Internet and policy organized by the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford) at the 2015 International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP) held in Milan. Two main themes emerged from the panel: the challenges of high cost and low participation which many e-participation initiatives have faced; and the potential Big Data seems to hold for remedying these problems. This introduction briefly presents these themes and links them to the papers in the issue. It argues that Big Data can fix some of the problems typically encountered by e-participation initiatives: it can offer a solution to the problem of low turnout which is furthermore accessible to government bodies even if they have low levels of financial resources. However, the use of Big Data in this way is also a radically different approach to the problem of involving citizens in policymaking; and the editorial concludes by reflecting on the significance of this for the policymaking process….(More)”

“Big Data Europe” addresses societal challenges with data technologies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Across society, from health to agriculture and transport, from energy to climate change and security, practitioners in every discipline recognise the potential of the enormous amounts of data being created every day. The challenge is to capture, manage and process that information to derive meaningful results and make a difference to people’s lives. The Big Data Europe project has just released the first public version of its open source platform designed to do just that. In 7 pilot studies, it is helping to solve societal challenges by putting cutting edge technology in the hands of experts in fields other than IT.

Although many crucial big data technologies are freely available as open source software, they are often difficult for non-experts to integrate and deploy. Big Data Europe solves that problem by providing a package that can readily be installed locally or at any scale in a cloud infrastructure by a systems administrator, and configured via a simple user interface. Tools like Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Flink and many others can be instantiated easily….

The tools included in the platform were selected after a process of requirements-gathering across the seven societal challenges identified by the European Commission (Health, Food, Energy, Transport, Climate, Social Sciences and Security). Tasks like message passing are handled using Kafka and Flume, storage by Hive and Cassandra, or publishing through geotriples. The platform uses the Docker system to make it easy to add new tools and, again, for them to operate at a scale limited only by the computing infrastructure….

The platform can be downloaded from GitHub.
See also the installation instructions, Getting Started and video.”

The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Cass R. Sunstein: “In recent years, ‘Nudge Units’ or ‘Behavioral Insights Teams’ have been created in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other nations. All over the world, public officials are using the behavioral sciences to protect the environment, promote employment and economic growth, reduce poverty, and increase national security. In this book, Cass R. Sunstein, the eminent legal scholar and best-selling co-author of Nudge (2008), breaks new ground with a deep yet highly readable investigation into the ethical issues surrounding nudges, choice architecture, and mandates, addressing such issues as welfare, autonomy, self-government, dignity, manipulation, and the constraints and responsibilities of an ethical state. Complementing the ethical discussion, The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science contains a wealth of new data on people’s attitudes towards a broad range of nudges, choice architecture, and mandates…(More)”

What is being done with open government data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

An exploratory analysis of public uses of New York City open data by Karen Okamoto in Webology: “In 2012, New York City Council passed legislation to make government data open and freely available to the public. By approving this legislation, City Council was attempting to make local government more transparent, accountable, and streamlined in its operations. It was also attempting to create economic opportunities and to encourage the public to identify ways in which to improve government and local communities. The purpose of this study is to explore public uses of New York City open data. Currently, more than 1300 datasets covering broad areas such as health, education, transportation, public safety, housing and business are available on the City’s Open Data Portal. This study found a plethora of maps, visualizations, tools, apps and analyses made by the public using New York City open data. Indeed, open data is inspiring a productive range of creative reuses yet questions remain concerning how useable the data is for users without technical skills and resources….(More)”

Trust in Government

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First issue of the Government Oxford Review focusing on trust (or lack of trust) in government:

“In 2016, governments are in the firing line. Their populations suspect them of accelerating globalisation for the benefit of the few, letting trade drive away jobs, and encouraging immigration so as to provide cheaper labour and to fill skills-gaps without having to invest in training. As a result the ‘anti-government’, ‘anti-expert’, ‘anti-immigration’ movements are rapidly gathering support. The Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom, the Presidential run of Donald Trump in the United States, and the Five Star movement in Italy are but three examples.” Dean Ngaire Woods

Our contributors have shed an interesting, and innovative, light on this issue. McKinsey’s Andrew Grant and Bjarne Corydon discuss the importance of transparency and accountability of government, while Elizabeth Linos, from the Behavioural Insights Team in North America, and Princeton’s Eldar Shafir discuss how behavioural science can be utilised to implement better policy, and Geoff Mulgan, CEO at Nesta, provides insights into how harnessing technology can bring about increased collective intelligence.

The Conference Addendum features panel summaries from the 2016 Challenges of Government Conference, written by our MPP and DPhil in Public Policy students.

Documents:
PDF icon Oxford Government Review 1 – The Trust Issue
PDF icon Oxford Government Review 1 – Conference addendum (More)”

Discrimination by Design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lena Groeger at ProPublica: “A few weeks ago, Snapchat released a new photo filter. It appeared alongside many of the other such face-altering filters that have become a signature of the service. But instead of surrounding your face with flower petals or giving you the nose and ears of a Dalmatian, the filter added slanted eyes, puffed cheeks and large front teeth. A number of Snapchat users decried the filter as racist, saying it mimicked a “yellowface” caricature of Asians. The company countered that they meant to represent anime characters and deleted the filter within a few hours.

“Snapchat is the prime example of what happens when you don’t have enough people of color building a product,” wrote Bay Area software engineer Katie Zhu in an essay she wrote about deleting the app and leaving the service. In a tech world that hires mostly white men, the absence of diverse voices means that companies can be blind to design decisions that are hurtful to their customers or discriminatory.A Snapchat spokesperson told ProPublica that the company has recently hired someone to lead their diversity recruiting efforts.

A Snapchat spokesperson told ProPublica that the company has recently hired someone to lead their diversity recruiting efforts.

But this isn’t just Snapchat’s problem. Discriminatory design and decision-making affects all aspects of our lives: from the quality of our health care and education to where we live to what scientific questions we choose to ask. It would be impossible to cover them all, so we’ll focus on the more tangible and visual design that humans interact with every day.

You can’t talk about discriminatory design without mentioning city planner Robert Moses, whose public works projects shaped huge swaths of New York City from the 1930s through the 1960s. The physical design of the environment is a powerful tool when it’s used to exclude and isolate specific groups of people. And Moses’ design choices have had lasting discriminatory effects that are still felt in modern New York.

A notorious example: Moses designed a number of Long Island Parkway overpasses to be so low that buses could not drive under them. This effectively blocked Long Island from the poor and people of color who tend to rely more heavily on public transportation. And the low bridges continue to wreak havoc in other ways: 64 collisions were recorded in 2014 alone (here’s a bad one).

The design of bus systems, railways, and other forms of public transportation has a history riddled with racial tensions and prejudiced policies. In the 1990s the Los Angeles’ Bus Riders Union went to court over the racial inequity they saw in the city’s public transportation system. The Union alleged that L.A.’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority spent “a disproportionately high share of its resources on commuter rail services, whose primary users were wealthy non-minorities, and a disproportionately low share on bus services, whose main patrons were low income and minority residents.” The landmark case was settled through a court-ordered consent decree that placed strict limits on transit funding and forced the MTA to invest over $2 billion in the bus system.

Of course, the design of a neighborhood is more than just infrastructure. Zoning laws and regulations that determine how land is used or what schools children go to have long been used as a tool to segregate communities. All too often, the end result of zoning is that low-income, often predominantly black and Latino communities are isolated from most of the resources and advantages of wealthy white communities….(More)”

Data for Policy: Data Science and Big Data in the Public Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Innar Liiv at OXPOL: “How can big data and data science help policy-making? This question has recently gained increasing attention. Both the European Commission and the White House have endorsed the use of data for evidence-based policy making.

Still, a gap remains between theory and practice. In this blog post, I make a number of recommendations for systematic development paths.

RESEARCH TRENDS SHAPING DATA FOR POLICY

‘Data for policy’ as an academic field is still in its infancy. A typology of the field’s foci and research areas are summarised in the figure below.

 

diagram1

 

Besides the ‘data for policy’ community, there are two important research trends shaping the field: 1) computational social science; and 2) the emergence of politicised social bots.

Computational social science (CSS) is an new interdisciplinary research trend in social science, which tries to transform advances in big data and data science into research methodologies for understanding, explaining and predicting underlying social phenomena.

Social science has a long tradition of using computational and agent-based modelling approaches (e.g.Schelling’s Model of Segregation), but the new challenge is to feed real-life, and sometimes even real-time information into those systems to get gain rapid insights into the validity of research hypotheses.

For example, one could use mobile phone call records to assess the acculturation processes of different communities. Such a project would involve translating different acculturation theories into computational models, researching the ethical and legal issues inherent in using mobile phone data and developing a vision for generating policy recommendations and new research hypothesis from the analysis.

Politicised social bots are also beginning to make their mark. In 2011, DARPA solicited research proposals dealing with social media in strategic communication. The term ‘political bot’ was not used, but the expected results left no doubt about the goals…

The next wave of e-government innovation will be about analytics and predictive models.  Taking advantage of their potential for social impact will require a solid foundation of e-government infrastructure.

The most important questions going forward are as follows:

  • What are the relevant new data sources?
  • How can we use them?
  • What should we do with the information? Who cares? Which political decisions need faster information from novel sources? Do we need faster information? Does it come with unanticipated risks?

These questions barely scratch the surface, because the complex interplay between general advancements of computational social science and hovering satellite topics like political bots will have an enormous impact on research and using data for policy. But, it’s an important start….(More)”