Protecting Elder Vermonters with Data

UPDATE: In light of COVID-19 Andrea has agreed to host this as a virtual meetup!

Over the course of nearly a year, Seven Days and Vermont Public Radio combed through thousands of pages of records on Vermont’s 133 state-regulated eldercare homes to quantify nearly six years of regulatory violations and report on the homes and how they’re regulated.

Though that data was available and searchable for federally regulated nursing homes, information on inspections for state-regulated homes existed only in poorly scanned, inscrutable documents buried on the Division of Licensing and Protection’s website. So Seven Days data editor Andrea Suozzo built a searchable database to make those records publicly searchable — https://eldercare.sevendaysvt.com.

How do you even begin a project like this? What goes into figuring out what information to ask for when the dataset doesn’t already exist? And what happens when your data focus shifts more than halfway through that process? Andrea will break down the process — and the pitfalls — of creating the Vermont Eldercare Navigator.

Meeting password: eldercare

Join the BTV Dev slack to chat with us in the #wimlds channel.
http://btvdev-slackin.herokuapp.com/

Speaker Bio
Andrea Suozzo is the data editor at Seven Days. She spends her time building tools to help find and tell stories, analyzing and visualizing data, and thinking about how to make public information more easily accessible. She also teaches data visualization at Champlain College.