Legislation + Product Management

It’s been five years since I first scrubbed in and started working on government problems. One of my early impactful experiences after moving to DC for a year in 2017 was taking a walk next to the White House with my friend Natalie and talking about the 21st Century Cures Act. In that huge piece of legislation, the words “Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)” are referenced a handful of times, a very important signal for government agencies and the healthcare industry to progress into a more interoperable existence. At that time, I didn’t have a clue about policy-making, the legislative process or regulation but soon came to understand the intersection of policy and product management is a fascinating place to work for a product manager and a core product muscle to develop.

In this space where policy and product meet, a product manager can find themselves helping write policy, implement policy or being subject to policy.

Examples:

Writing policy – helping advise policymakers at a Federal agency, Congress or State Legislature on specific technical things or approaches. Ex: CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Rule
Implementing policy – building software, websites and new teams to help a government agency implement some new legislation or regulation. Ex: Medicaid member experience, Paid Family and Medical Leave, Unemployment Insurance, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, etc.
Subject to policy – designing new product features for your business based on opportunities or requirements policy creates. Health data interoperability, privacy, crypto regulation, grant funding opportunities, etc.

For this post, let’s focus on Implementing policy.

How a Product Manager should think about Implementing Policy

Today, big pieces are legislation are treated as requirements documents in which different requirements are usually delegated out to various government agencies to implement. For example, in the recently enacted Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), there are approximately 14 agencies responsible for 375 programs that will carry out provisions of the bill.

But…before going into implementing legislation as a product manager, a quick primer on the structure of legislation like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

The Structure of Legislation

The legislation is called an “Act”. Within the Act, there are divisions, titles and subtitles that have many sections.

Each of these sections can have highly prescriptive or super vague direction. For example, on page 1182 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) you’ll find a specific definition of “reliable broadband service”.

Often times, legislation is prescriptive as to how it should be implemented once passed. For example, the Colorado Paid Family and Medical Leave Insurance Act defines a new division be created within the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment to run the new program.

For the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), an Executive Order immediately followed the passage of the bill which established a Task Force.

The process sometimes feels more like art than science and can vary widely across levels of government and the type of policy being created. For example, in both Federal and state governments, the legislature (Congress) makes laws but federal and state agencies can create regulation. To further codify how a piece of legislation should be implemented, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) may issue guidance to agencies that have “statutory responsibilities”. As you can see from this IIJA guidance from OMB, it further defines how everyone should coordinate with each other across government.

Products created by Legislation

Ok, now that you have a sense of the structure of a big piece of legislation, let’s talk about the products the signing of a new bill or publishing of a new regulation may hatch.

Imagine you are a product manager in the government tapped to work on implementing a new policy. Not unlike most products you’ve likely worked on, there is some type of vision or high-level goals (probably spelled out in the legislative text) and will likely need a website, community building, customer success and internal dashboards.

Website(s)

A piece of legislation and accompanying guidance will likely have a lifespan of a decade or longer. During these many years, state and local governments, territories, Tribal nations, non-profits, businesses, media and others will be learning about the bill. It is important to establish a source of truth for ongoing communication about the bill as the legislative text, once passed, is static on congress.gov.

For example, for Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the website Build.gov was created to provide a home for information about the programs that span infrastructure themes such as broadband, water and transportation. A PDF guidebook was also created that summarizes each of the programs. This website is just one web property in an ecosystem that includes:

Build.gov – summarizes the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), PDF guidebook, searchable program inventory.
Grants.gov – the application process for many of the grant programs funded by IIJA.
Agency Program webpages – program specific information including application eligibility, notice of funding opportunities (NOFOs) and technical assistance. Ex: Bus and Bus Facilities Program from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA).
Sam.gov – detailed information about each program (call an “assistance listing” in grant-speak).

Along with websites, as a PM you’ll be engaging with secondary sources of information, typically local and national media coverage as well as webinars, infographics and white papers put out by hundreds of associations and consulting or lobbying firms.

OKRs and Dashboards

A variety of data products such as dashboards, shared datasets and more are required to coordinate across agencies and manage a large piece of legislation effectively.

Usually, in artifacts that support the legislation or in the bill text itself, you’ll find some type of guidance or direction about how outcomes and impact should be measured. For example, in the IIJA Executive Order, priorities were defined. This means there also needs to be a way to measure and report on these priorities…which means data and dashboards.

Beyond using data to inform decision-making of the policy implementation, oversight needs to be considered from day one. Reports to Congress and readouts with stakeholders are important for PMs to consider.

(Map showing bipartisan infrastructure bill funding)

Web apps

For legislation that directs funding, usually to state, local, territorial and Tribal governments or non-profits, some type of reporting from those entities back to the Federal government is required, which means you’re likely building a web app. As conditions change, these reporting and compliance requirements also evolve. As a PM, you need to be thinking about a reporting and compliance user experience that is easy for funding recipients. As I’ve talked with folks in all levels of government about grant funding specifically, reporting and compliance burden is always a complaint, especially for small governments without big teams to handle this.

Web apps to support legislation are tricky because many of them have been built in the past to support a variety of different types of legislation and the user experiences have been less than great. So, as a PM, you need to embrace the learnings from these teams and try and avoid building the next web app that most users don’t really like.

Another category of web apps you may find yourself building as a PM helping to launch new legislation are web apps that support some type of functionality required by the policy. In this example, the Quality Payments Program from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) supports regulation that requires healthcare providers to upload information via a website or integrate with an API.

Delivery Teams

New policy usually means new delivery teams are needed to build the websites, dashboards and web apps to support the policy. Depending on which government agency or agencies are tasked with implementing legislation, they may not have an operating budget to procure a software delivery team, purchase cloud infrastructure, run sophisticated digital marketing campaigns, and so on. For example, the White House and State Governor’s Offices are examples of structures that don’t have a ton of capacity to ship software versus Federal or state agencies who have a huge portfolio of software products, existing devops processes and cloud infrastructure, cyber security policies, etc etc. In most cases, having the delivery live within an agency of a shared services group like the Office of Information Technology is the preferred path.

As you get started as a PM on a new policy, regulation or legislation, work hard to get clarity on how the delivery teams will be structured. This will be hard as there’s a lot at stake and a ton of pressure to move fast.

Conclusion

Over these five years in government, one of the things that caused me to fall in love with this work is the sheer reach of it all. New legislation, policy or regulation has the potential to change an industry or impact millions of people.

This is also a space where I’ve seen firsthand the impact of “software is eating government” (a remix of the phrase coined by Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape). Software has begun to permeate every aspect of our lives and is fundamentally changing business models. We cannot afford to ignore technology as we deliver government services, this includes upstream in the policy-making process.

It’s a really good sign if you, the product manager, are part of the team tasked with implementing a new policy. When done right, your expertise in user experience, software development and product design combined with the brilliance and experience of the policy wonks and government experts has the potential to delivery something truly special.

Wrap Up: My “digital tour of service” with the State of Colorado

Every morning I wake up to the local NPR station (KUNC) playing on my Alexa, grab a cup of coffee, lay back down and listen. It’s a preview of the weeks ahead. Working in state government puts you at the intersection of federal policy and local service delivery. Sometimes things state government builds directly impacts people, and sometimes it enables those in county and local government to serve residents and citizens in a better way.

The Colorado Digital Service (CDS), a team I co-founded with Matthew McAllister, is two years old now and I am wrapping up my “digital tour of service.” CDS is a diverse, cross-functional team of senior engineers, human-centered design specialists, product managers and procurement specialists within the Governor’s Office of Information Technology (OIT). We partner with state agencies to develop and improve human-centered solutions to Colorado’s most pressing technical challenges (and we are hiring).

Over the past two years, I’ve been incredibly proud of the work we’ve done on the COVID-19 response, with the child welfare team, and the new Paid Family and Medical Leave division. I can’t wait to see what the team delivers next.

A few lessons learned

A digital service can be an important tool for governments.

The original vision for the Colorado Digital Service was to create a small team of senior product managers, designers and engineers that would work on the Governor’s priorities and plug-in tightly with the Office of Information Technology. This has mostly played out as expected.

Why is a digital service important for your state government?
1. A digital service creates momentum for new ideas on hiring, software delivery and problem solving that can be leveraged government-wide. Publishing the Modern Software Delivery Index, creating an agile vendor pool and finding new ways to connect Colorado tech talent to government are examples of ways the Colorado Digital Service has done this here in Colorado.

2. For agency initiatives that are emerging, a digital service can be leveraged to prototype, build, ship and continuously improve upon these initiatives until the sunset or transfer into an agency program. Bug Bounty, Digital Vaccine Credentials, Exposure Notifications and Developer Evangelism are examples from the Colorado Digital Service just this year.

3. When brand new agency programs or offices are created, a digital service can help with human-centered design, rapid prototyping, product management and vendor procurements in the early stages of formation. In Colorado, we have seen a new Paid Family and Medical Leave program, Office of Early Childhood Education, and Office of Behavioral Health launch just this year.

A lot of progress has been made to improve the delivery of government services, but we still have work to do.

One of the big takeaways from the past few years in government is that some decades old rules combined with perverse incentives hamper government’s ability to deliver. Everyone wants to make government work better for the people, from tech talent who are curious about working in government, to the career civil servants that have been chipping away at problems for years.

Here are a few things that are gradually improving but need to be better.

Hiring – In Colorado, we can’t hire anyone that lives outside of Colorado, we have outdated position classifications and our product, design and engineering salaries continue to be non-competitive with the private sector. We continue to attract great talent despite these constraints thanks to the tireless work from Colorado’s HR folks and agency directors that find creative ways to staff teams. Refactoring hiring is happening but more needs to be done such as improving how funding is allocated to these positions and competing on salary (read Tips for Finding Ways into Public Sector Work).

Delivery teams – Funding for enterprise applications can be sporadic based on a change in legislative priorities, economic climate or specifics of policy which makes it hard for government teams to hire full-time employees so outsourcing to contractors and vendors is the norm. This perpetuates a “project” instead of “product” mentality of “When will it be done?” and “We have to spend the money now.” In government, many of the technology applications that serve programs like Medicaid, child welfare and public safety are never “done”. Delivery teams need full-time government employees that can focus on delivery with a consistent funding stream over time in partnership with vendors.

Procurement – Governments can have hundreds of enterprise applications and initiatives. How government teams decide to work with contractors and vendors is a huge factor in their success. Although there has been a powerful movement in procurement reform across governments at all levels, moving to a modular, agile way of working is still new in government (watch Waldo’s talk on this). When an program team insists on developing a massive list of requirements to be delivered by a certain date for a certain price and then adds additional constraints such as a vendor having to take on substantial liability for the “system as a whole” or having a certain number of employees onsite, they think they are doing the right thing by “guaranteeing success” and reducing risk. Time after time this approach has been shown to fail (read Government tech projects fail by default. It doesn’t have to be this way).

What’s coming next for government teams is pretty easy to envision

The delivery of digital services across the government is maturing. In some Federal and State Agencies as well as local governments, you will see teams working in an agile way, using human-centered design to better understand the problems they are solving and shipping software that works on mobile devices.

Looking ahead, here are a few things that are either a growing part of a government’s portfolio or coming soon.

APIs – Interoperability between agencies, counties and community partners, open data and giving residents/citizens/patients access to their personal data is a growing piece of the puzzle for government service delivery. We are already seeing states subject to regulation by the Federal government to provide Medicaid patients access to their health information and more of this type of regulation will come. There is also a strong demand from the private sector to access open data sets and have ways to transact with governments.

Layers of Government – For programs that span multiple agencies (CDC and CMS for example) or multiple levels of government (Federal to State to Local), a digital service can help break down silos and glue efforts together. There is already collaboration between states happening formally in monthly working groups and informally across networks of peers. Governments at all levels should be working as a portfolio in many of the large enterprise applications like unemployment insurance, Medicaid and paid family and medical leave sharing open source projects and reusing composable building blocks instead of paying the same vendors to duplicate software applications over and over for each state.

Machine Learning – Fraud detection, robotic process automation, public health outbreak prediction and so much more is coming to the government. Understanding how to manage ML pipelines, train models, and incorporate all of the ethical considerations that this technology will raise for a government into the product management process will be critical. Digital service experts that have experience training and deploying models or designing product features that leverage these models will be important. [read Digital Services to APIs to ML]

Onward!

After 20 years building software in bootstrapped small businesses, venture-backed startups and large enterprises, I feel incredibly lucky to have stumbled into government and fallen in love with the work. My work-life has never had more purpose that it does now and I’m excited to continue chipping away at these problems.

Thanks to my Colorado Digital Service teammates, Governor Polis and his team, and all of my colleagues in the Office of Information Technology and within the agencies for helping the Colorado Digital Service get off the ground and become an important part of service delivery to Coloradans. I am grateful to you for giving this idea a chance.As for me, I’m boomeranging back to the US Digital Service to serve another digital tour of service taking my learnings and inspiration from Colorado to the Federal government.

Medicaid Blue Button API Use Cases

This post is simply a list of use cases that helps all of us understand why the Medicaid Blue Button API is super important to Medicaid members.

Btw – here is the list of apps that are built using the CMS Medicare Blue Button API and another list of apps that have agreed to the CARIN code of conduct.

Providers

Claims data is one component of a patient’s complete, longitudinal digital health record adding cost, coverage and adherence.

These are ways in which Medicaid members having access to their claims information or sharing this data with their Provider can have an impact.

Providers can share data with each other given a patients consent
Patients can download their claims data into a personal health record like Apple Health and show information to their provider during the visit
Patients receive Infrequent procedure reminders (ex: annual exam, colonoscopy every 5 years, etc)
Easy way for family member/caregiver to access medical information in emergency (important for authorization access not to time out too quickly). Apple is also working on this (emerging).
Improving care coordination by sharing information with all members of a Medicaid member’s care team
Decreases printing of records a provider needs to do
An at-risk provider having difficulty accessing a patient’s longitudinal claims record (like we heard re: the Oncology Care Model – which shares such data up to six months after the initial trigger event) could gain more timely access to this data via Medicaid member granting permission.
Comparing & reconciling patient-level payor EOBs vs provider bills
Automatic pre-population of initial visit forms (save time, increase accuracy)

Example: Did Jane have a Cervical Cancer screening at her last OB/GYN visit?

Jane, a 55 yr old female Medicaid member visits her PCP. She is handed an iPad to checkin and sees “Login to your Medicaid account to share data with Dr. Smith.”
She logs with her Medicaid username and password
She sees a spinning wheel and reads “Your Medicaid claims data has been downloaded and is up-to-date!”
Her claims data from Medicaid is synced to Dr. Smith’s EMR
Dr. Smith pulls up her chart during the visit and sees that she’s had the recommended Cervical Cancer screening
The Provider is complying with this screening CMS quality measure

Research

From Apple’s Research Kit to Verily’s Project Baseline, making it easy for a patient to contribute health data to a clinical trial or research study is powerful.

A Contract Research Organization (CRO) can incorporate Medicaid claims data to improve the accuracy of monitoring during a Clinical Trial.
Apps like Verily’s Project Baseline enable participants to connect a variety of personal health data sources to better inform the researchers.
Clinical Trial enrollment – A research organization can pre-populate a medication list for a patient during clinical trial enrollment.
Donate data to research (ex: precision medicine, “All of Us” research cohort/Sync for Science, Health eHeart Study (UCSF)

Prescriptions

Medication adherence
Navigating affordable care options (eg brand vs generic medication)

Example: Signup for home delivery of medication

XYZ Pharma is a full-service pharmacy that sorts your medication by the dose and delivers it to your door. They would use Medicaid claims history to reduce the Patient’s burden during the signup process, to better understand their prior billing cadence and to build a better profile of their medication history.

Health and Fitness

Example: Personal Health Record

A 59 year old woman from Cleveland, OH named Bettie has an iPhone 8 and a Fitbit her son bought her for Christmas. Her friend told her about an iPhone app that lets her see all of her medical records on her phone called “MedView”. She searches for it in the app store and downloads it. Her favorite apps on the iPhone are Weather.com and Facebook. She opens the app and it asks her to login with her Medicaid account. She enters her username and password and sees a “welcome message” display on the app. Success! The app shows her some personally identifiable information and tells her it’s downloading her entire record from Medicaid. She sees a status bar going to 100%. A few seconds later she sees a timeline view of her information.

Financial

Forecasting & planning a personal health care budget (based on previous year information)
Connect your Medicaid data to health insurance shopping app or an accounting app like Quicken for tax deductions.

Brainstorming list

Below is a list of terms and concepts to trigger more ideas about how patient access to claims data can help make an impact on people’s lives and health.

Folks moving from Medicaid to Medicare or from private health insurance on to Medicaid or vice-versa
eLTSS examples
Home Health Care
Assisted Living
Primary Care
Senior Social Networks
Wearables
Transportation
Patient Portals
Chronic Disease Management
Social Isolation
Preventative Care
Medication Adherence
Digital Therapeutics
EHR interoperability
Longitudinal Patient record
Patient education
Preference-sensitive care
Medication reconciliation & adherence tools
Care team indexing & name/ID sharing with other providers
Evidence-based clinical decision support
Quality-related application & services for Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs)
Chronic disease management (including personal health tracking – eg for patients with diabetes)

Good Articles

Use of the Blue Button Online Tool for Sharing Health Information: Qualitative Interviews With Patients and Providers (PubMed 2015)

New iPhone Health app feature gives doctors easier access to data (The Verge, June 2021)

Digital Services to APIs to ML

Hanging out with Brandon Williams and Lilo Santos on the Public Sector Community’s Coffee

#CivicTech is having a moment. As government gets better at delivering digital services to residents, they face challenges ahead from building APIs to wrestling with machine learning.

Digital Services

The delivery of digital services across government is maturing. In some Federal and State Agencies as well as local governments, you will see teams working in an agile way, using human-centered design to better understand the problems they are solving and shipping software that works fine on mobile devices. Organizations like 18F, United States Digital Service, Code for America and many more are driving the conversion on building good government using technology. There is still much work to be done for government to evolve into high-performing software delivery teams and to use agile budgeting to better align team funding with how teams want to work, strengthening product management across all layers of government, modernizing legacy systems and so much more.

Open Data and APIs

We have also seen the rise of open data published by cities, counties, and state and federal agencies. This drives innovation and transparency, keys to good government. Open datasets are typically aggregated data that do not include personal information.

Next, we will see governments making APIs available so residents, citizens, patients, taxpayers, etc can have an option to easy share the information their government holds with the apps, services, businesses and other government agencies they choose.

For example, a Medicaid patient can share their insurance claims history with a home-delivery prescription drug service or a parent can share their children’s immunization history with a summer camp that requires this information to register a child.

Offering these types of APIs will be a big challenge for most governments as they have never built information services that software developers are consuming to then provide a service to the constituent. With open data, governments mostly took a “build it and they will come” approach in which they simply made the data available and let the market figure out what to do with it. However, when building APIs on top of protected, personal information, governments will need to play an important role in helping developers successful adopt the APIs.

With API delivery, value is only realized when the developer is able to leverage the API to deliver something meaningful to the constituent.

In parallel with delivering APIs for 3rd party software developers to consume, governments will also get more sophisticated on how to exchange data within government itself. Should a State Medicaid agency be able to exchange personal health information about a patient with the State Human Services agency that offers mental health benefits that patient could leverage? Where do you draw the line and when must the constituent give their consent? These are big challenges and need people working for government that understand both the technology and business of APIs as well as policy related to data sharing.

Machine Learning

Fraud detection, robotic process automation, public health outbreak prediction and so much more is coming to government. Understanding how to manage ML pipelines, train models, and incorporate all of the ethical considerations that this technology will raise for a government into the product management process will be critical.

Books like Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks demonstrates how bias is introduced into systems and is super relevant for government leaders working on or thinking about building prediction or filtering systems.

Whereas vendors can offer off-the-shelf solutions like chatbots that introduce some AI into government systems without the government agency teams needing any understanding of the underlying technology, the government teams building enterprise applications will need ML engineers and experienced product managers. Government will once again need to compete with the incredible demand for this type of technologist as well as the high salaries their skills command.

If government teams still struggle with web apps, mobile experiences and stability of systems, how will they possible handle the sophistication of ML pipelines?

In government, the ROI is social impact. Residents leveraging easy-to-use digital services to pay their taxes, register a car or access a benefit helps them focus on what matters, their daily life. APIs and machine learning enable these digital services to get that much better.

We are living in an era where trust in government is low and the demand for competency and transparency in government is high. As government continues to deliver for the people, this trust improves over the long-run. We must keep working, all of us.

Consumer Access to Vaccine Records

As millions of Americans receive vaccinations in the coming months, will there be a consumer demand for vaccine data or “proof of vaccine” on their smartphones?

This NY Times article is a great read.

There is a serious debate on whether health passes, electronic vaccine credentials, proof of vaccine, etc is truly needed. Assuming it does happen, below is a quick summary of some of the puzzle pieces.

Patient Portals

When a provider administers a vaccine, it is entered into their electronic medical record system. Today, people can use apps on their smartphones to connect with the doctor’s electronic medical system called a “Patient Portal”. You setup a username and password with your doctor to login to the Patient Portal website to view your health records such as lab results, immunizations and prescriptions.

Apps like Apple Health and CommonPass (Android) use common health data standards (HL7 FHIR) and application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect with these patient portals if your doctor has opted to make this available.

Here’s an example from Aaron Miri, CIO UT Austin showing vaccine records from a EHR connected to an iPhone displaying within the Apple Health app.

Immunization Information Systems

Each state, US territory and many large cities have an Immunization Information System (IIS) that is basically a big database that doctors, public health clinics and others have to report every vaccination into.

Vendors like Envision WebIZ and STC Health One that build these IIS systems that governments buy have consumer access portals.

Here’s an example from Nevada.

These portals use name, phone number and date or birth to match records and then the person can print out their vaccination records.

Hopefully, these vendors will introduce APIs that enable consumers connect their immunization records to their smartphones. States rely on these vendors and will likely not build these APIs on their own.

Work and School Safety Apps

There are a bunch of products that now help businesses and schools manage the health and safety of their populations. These tools will have features to track vaccinations.

An open question is whether these tools will be able to directly access vaccine records for their populations from the immunization information systems and in-turn enable consumers to have this data on their smartphones.

Tech stuff

Below is a list of additional reading on the technical topics related to interoperability of immunization data.

Medicaid Blue Button for States

States don’t need their own API sandboxes, code samples or developer support to enable 3rd party developers to adopt the new Medicaid APIs required by the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Rule.

The rule basically says each state Medicaid plan (and many other types of plans) needs to “build their own Blue Button API” as many state health IT people say.`

I was part of the team that built the CMS Blue Button API. We had to do a few things:

Map claims data to FHIR, setup a FHIR server, build an auth service, setup an API gateway
Build a developer portal with a sandbox, docs, sample apps, production API access process and more.
Procure the project in a way there was long-term investment in continuous improvement to the infrastructure, APIs and developer experience.

My friend Sam’s blog post Building your own Claims API from 2018 is a great read to better understand what our CMS team did and you’ll have to do for your state.

Because all states will be using the FHIR and OAuth standards, all of their APIs should be pretty much the same. This is super important because it means that states shouldn’t build their own sandboxes, docs or sample apps.

Let’s build a coalition

A group of states and organizations should get together and build an API sandbox. This will give developers a chance to play around with the APIs and prototype them into their own apps.

There should be a github site with a bunch of sample apps or build on CMS’s github along with more tutorials like Install an Angular Client App.

I’m looking forward to seeing what thought-leaders like the CARIN Alliance, CMS, vendors and states will do to bring people together here. Sharing things like a Blue Button sandbox will save taxpayer dollars and accelerate time-to-market for most states.

Happy Building!

Discoverability of COVID-19 testing sites

There is a national emphasis on COVID-19 testing now which makes the discoverability of local COVID-19 testing sites super important.

Schema.org has published new COVID-19 related tags including a CovidTestingFacility tag.

The White House has published general guidance for Federal and State CIOs

The City of Chicago’s Public Health Order 2020-6 Executive Order on April 29th mandates testing sites use these tags to publish machine-readable test site location data on their websites.

Apple Maps has these instructions on how to upload test site location data as well.

A typical discovery experience may look something like this (kinda obvious but worth noting):

Person is told to get a test or thinks they need a test, searches for COVID-19 testing sites

2. After clicking “Coronavirus testing centers” they see results and a map

3. Then they click on “Website” to go to the testing location’s website

How a Civil Servant ends up building APIs

One of my favorite stories from my time in Washington, D.C. came from a dedicated civil servant who became one of my closest friends and colleagues at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.

With a background in public health and a passion to help people, she joined CMS 25 years ago. Over time, the policies and programs she was working on needed websites. As she took on more and more responsibility and began managing these programs, the websites now needed to allow people to login…and be discoverable on Google…and have web analytics…and conform to design guidelines…etc etc. She found herself learning about agile software development and using github.

Today, these same policies and programs now have APIs and all of the complexities that come along with building and operating APIs such as developer portals, key management, new security risks and developer evangelism to drive the adoption of these APIs.

When I asked my friend what her proudest moment has been at CMS she told me a story about helping get lead paint out of houses with kids in Baltimore. It is the impact that drives her, not the tech. She didn’t grow up coding in her parents’ basement or have fond memories of the first app she built. As Marc Andreesson says “software is eating the world” and this is so very true for government programs and the dedicated civil servants that run them.

By the way, the US Digital Service is always hiring.

Launching Your State Digital Service

A Digital Service team with a one or two year “digital tour of duty” model is a way for the top engineers, designers and product managers in your city or state to work full-time on the civic tech problems that make a difference for your citizens.

Most of the best tech talent in your State is not working for the Government. They have probably never considered a career in public service or have no idea where to plugin. A Digital Service creates that pathway.

The United States Digital Service

The U.S. Digital Service was founded in 2014. Technologists from around the country move to Washington, D.C. for a one or two year term. Most of the 180 or so USDSers are assigned to an agency like HHS, DHS, DoD or the VA. Some work on longer-term projects at a single agency and others will work on many varying projects across multiple agencies. The USDS is paid for out of a part of the OMB budget called ITOR. Because the USDS has found technology solutions that save millions of dollars and executed on projects yielding very positive results for the American people, their funding and work continues.

Setting up your State Digital Service

In a State Digital Service model, the keys are funding and air cover. It needs support from the top, either from the Governor or Mayor. A big decision that needs to be made is where the Digital Service lives in your State’s Government structure. Often, the initial thinking is for the Digital Service to report into the Office of Information Technology (OIT) because “it’s a technology thing”. If OIT works across agencies and has great leadership, this could work well. If not, your Digital Service could simply be viewed as staff augmentation and likely will fail.

You’ll need a charter, funding and the first cohort of awesome designers, engineers and product managers from your State ready to serve. If the right structure is put in place, the talent in your region will seek out opportunities to be involved.

Once you’re setup and have your inaugural team on board, now the real work begins. Picking the right projects is key.

The Work

In my year with the U.S. Digital Service I have seen a few scenarios where our USDS team was uniquely positioned to make a big impact.

Cross-team Projects

At CMS, the Blue Button 2.0 project required many different teams align on a shared product vision. As anyone that has worked in a large enterprise knows, this is very complicated and hard to pull off in the best of circumstances. Because the USDS had the air cover from CMS leadership, we were able to recommend and execute on a path forward that brought together several teams across divisions within CMS and shipped Blue Button 2.0 within a few months.

Procurement

The USDS brings great engineers to the table alongside an agency team to assist with procurement process and technology decisions. The USDS helped design an Agile BPA and various processes to evaluate vendor proposals that included submitting code samples to Github and more. This is such an important part of the success of USDS, the team even has a nickname, the Procuremenati!

Design Sprints

A design sprint is a process in which a small, cross-discipline team goes really deep on a problem for a short amount of time, typically 2-4 weeks (Ex: Defense Digital Service design sprint). The nimble structure of a Digital Service team uniquely positions it for this type of work whereas normal agency constraints may hinder a successful design sprint.

Is your State ready?

To drive innovation, find new sources of talent and generally improve the quality of the software they are building for their citizens, State and Local Governments leverage many types of structures such as University Partnerships, Bloomberg I-Team Grants, Code for America and 18F, and more. In my home state of Colorado for example, there’s a thriving open data challenge called Go Code Colorado, a Code for Denver brigade, over 1,300 datasets in the Open Colorado data portal and learnings from work with Code for America and more. This is the type of CivicTech energy you want as you ready for your State’s Digital Service. It shows a strong demand to engage in Government from your local tech community.

Each team begins differently. The US Digital Service was born out of the technical problems during the launch of healthcare.gov and is four years old now. The Canadian Digital Service launched less than a year ago and has added GovTech leaders like Aaron Snow to the team. The UK Digital Service began in 2010 out of a “Digital by Default” mandate and has paved the way for other Digital Service teams.

Summary

The Digital Service magic happens when you combine the private sector design, engineering, and product management talent with Government talent that has the policy knowledge, deep subject matter expertise and understands how to navigate bureaucracy.

I’m Joining the U.S. Digital Service

I have never been particularly interested in Government, Civic Tech and Politics with the exception of reading the Sunday NY Times, watching Meet the Press occasionally and being somewhat interested in the Open Data movement.

A year ago I had a conversation with Susannah Fox about AI, Healthcare and Aneesh Chopra’s book “The Innovative State“. I was inspired and began digging deeper into the intersection of Government and Technology. I learned about 18F, Cloud.gov and played around with datasets from data.gov. I watched hearings on the OPEN Data Act and subscribed to newsletters from Think Tanks like the Center for Data Innovation.

As it turns out, there’s an incredible amount of innovation and goodness happening in Government today from the use of open source to data transparency to progressive tech policy.

Susannah connected me with the US Digital Service, a group of Engineers, Designers, Product Managers and Digital Policy Experts that work across the Departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, and the Small Business Administration to improve websites, access to datasets, user experiences and more. It sounded awesome and I decided to give it a go.

An election, a hiring freeze, a few background checks and many interviews later, I was accepted into the program. My wife, kids and I are relocating from Denver, CO to Washington, D.C. for a year long “tour of duty”.

Learn more about the US Digital Service and how you can join!

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