Joseph Cevetello

Joseph Cevetello, City of Santa Monica

The City of Santa Monica is a full service city of 93,000 residents and 8.3 square miles. The city employees 2150 staff in 14 departments including Police, Fire, IT, Community Development, water utility, a broadband utility, and a federal airport.  The annual budget for the City is one billion dollars and it provides more services per capita than any city in Southern California. 

Supernova Award Category: 
AI and Augmented Humanity
The Problem: 

Santa Monica has long been at the vanguard of addressing homelessness. It allocates significant Police, Fire, and Human Services resources to support its homeless populations, but lacked real time awareness of the care provided to any one individual. In response, Santa Monica developed Connect an AI enabled App/data sharing platform enabling comprehensive awareness, coordination of care, and improved outcomes for those experiencing homelessness. Connect represents a remarkable collaboration among first responders, City services, and Akido Labs. It prioritizes and protects privacy while facilitating a coordinated City response. Connect’s success in Santa Monica has led to wider adoption by municipalities throughout LA County.

The Solution: 

Connect represents a remarkable collaboration among Police, Fire, Human Services, Information Services, and Akido Labs. It is a visionary public private partnership focused on providing actionable insight into a complex and persistent problem – a lack of comprehensive awareness how city services are impacting homelessness. No city had ever attempted something like Connect before. Our premise -the ability to see end-to-end engagement with individuals experiencing homeless would lead to better understanding of outcomes, save the City time and money, and most importantly help individuals by providing more complete information at the point of contact.

The City of Santa Monica with Akido Labs developed Connect - the first-of-its-kind mobile AI-enabled App and data sharing platform for first responders to homelessness. Connect allows for previoulsly unattainable situational awareness of the totality of care provided to any one individual experiencing homelessness. 

The Results: 

One example of how the use of Connect had a significant impact on a homeless individual’s quality of care is the story of Martin. Martin is an individual who has lived on the streets of Santa Monica for some time. One morning in September, a resident encountered Martin in a park, thought he was in duress, and called 911. Upon arriving, the Fire Department interacted with Marin, triaged and evaluated him. Because of Connect, EMS Staff knew that he was one of the current 100 “high utilizers” of homelessness services. Martin’s physical condition was determined to be stable, and he refused any further offer of help from the Fire Department, but the history of this encounter was retained in Connect. Later that afternoon, another 911 call occurred when Martin and another homeless individual had an altercation. Santa Monica Police responded, and after a lengthy encounter took Martin into custody. Because of Connect the Police Department knew that Martin had been contacted earlier in the day by the Fire Department; and, because of Connect, Martin’s case worker was alerted that he was taken into custody by the Police.

When the Police arrived at the Santa Monica Jail, his case worker was awaiting him. A conversation between the case worker and Police ensued and both parties agreed to release Martin to the case worker so he could receive the medical treatment that he had not had in some days. When Martin was released to the case worker he said, “I have been in and out of jail for about 15 years. In all my time, I have never had a family member, or a friend come to bail me out, but you were here before they ever booked me. You were here to help before I arrived, and you helped prevent me from being booked.” He was in disbelief and asked how it was possible. The case worker said because of the new technology that the City had deployed to help improved care for the homeless – Connect.

Metrics: 

During the first 6 months of deployment of Connect  there have been on average 150 new opportunities for case manager interventions every month. For the Police Department alone this has led to 37% fewer arrests for homeless high utilizers and 33% fewer police encounters. Fire (EMS) also saw a 27% reduction in deployments related to individuals experiencing homelessness. This not only benefits the individual because of fewer interactions with Police and/or Fire, but the City by decreasing the number of emergency deployments and thus saving the City significant funds.

The Technology: 

Connect is powered by the Akido Data Governance Platform - a HIPAA compliant data management platform designed specifically to support complex integrations around a patient centered data model in sensitive environments. In Santa Monica, the Akido Platform is configured to receive integrations across several modes (data feed, ETL etc.) from record management systems of the Police, Fire, and Human Services. Fuzzy matching is performed to match individual identities from data across multiple source systems and converted into a standardized format to be consumed by FHIR APIs. Fine grained access controls ensure that sensitive data is only accessible to permitted individuals within the organization. These controls are configured by Akido and determined by business rules set by Santa Monica.

From a data security and compliance perspective, all data is managed securely and in compliance with HIPAA. Connectencrypts all database files while at rest and when in transit using AES 256 and SSL/HTTPS. Security measures are in place to prevent, detect, and log unauthorized attempts to access sensitive and confidential data tracked within centralized logs. Additionally, the systems, services, and data are contained within the AWS Cloud in several different secure environments, Prod, Staging, QA, and Dev all with various layers of security and access control. A sophisticated authentication configuration includes complex password requirements, multi-factor authentication, and risk-based authentication leveraged through the enterprise identity and access management tool Okta.

The Connect mobile app itself is built using the modern mobile technology, React Native, which allows for simplified deployment across Android and iOS devices. The visual design of the application leverages the Material UI design library and frameworks, which is the same library used in all Google products. Using Material UI in Connect ensures that users have a feeling of familiarity with the user interface.

Disruptive Factor: 

Connect was tailored to the unique needs of Santa Monica through human centered design processes. This ensured that Connect is not only trauma informed but also informed by individuals with lived experience. These processes coupled with an agile development framework allowed Akido to quickly deploy a minimally viable solution to gain immediate traction, and then release agile incremental improvements based on user feedback.

An initiative like Connect had never been attempted before in any City to our knowledge. In fact, Connect’s success even helped inform a State Assembly bill that encouraged public agencies to share data about homelessness individuals. Connect not only helped lay the foundation for a cultural shift in the way City of Santa Monica staff now coordinate care for homeless communities in Santa Monica, but has also spurred other cities to adopt Connect.

Shining Moment: 

Connect tackles one of our society’s most visible, complex, and intractable problems. Innovation in the homelessness services space required an intricate level of internal stakeholder alignment, innovative public private partnerships, sophisticated data governance, and highly adaptable technology. Santa Monica's forward-thinking leadership not only successfully overcame these challenges but had the courage to navigate sensitive terrain and take appropriate risk to innovate.

Connect is an active intervention in the lives of some of our most vulnerable neighbors using data at its core. This innovation sparked not only a drastic improvement in the way the entire City used data in their day-to-day, but it has also changed the way public services across multiple cities are administered to people experiencing homelessness. Within Santa Monica, Connect has created the foundation for increased data liquidity by giving staff a gold standard to point to, and it demonstrated the impact of using integrated data to improve services and better operations for all within the community.

About City of Santa Monica

he City of Santa Monica is a full service city of 93,000 residents and 8.3 square miles. The city employees 2150 staff in 14 departments including Police, Fire, IT, Community Development, water utility, a broadband utility, and a federal airport.  The annual budget for the City is one billion dollars and it provides more services per capita than any city in Southern California.