10 things technologists can do to help make universal health care a reality

Progressive Codes Network organized calls with organizations for Universal Health Care to find ways to support them on the national and state level. Here’s what we found.

ProgCode took on the issue of Universal Health Care because it believes that health care is a right, not a privilege. We reached out to the following organizations working towards universal health care:

• Colorado Foundation for Universal Health Care — Bringing the best solutions forward through research and education.
• Healthcare-NOW! — fighting to win a national single-payer healthcare system because access to healthcare is basic to human dignity.
• Physicians of National Health Care Program (PNHP) — a non-profit research and education organization of 20,000 physicians, medical students and health professionals who support single-payer national health insurance.
• PNHP NY Metro Chapter
• Whole Washington — a grassroots coalition of healthcare professionals, activists and organizers with a common belief that healthcare is a human right, and Washington should be doing more to provide the best level of care to all residents.

We discussed the issues they are facing in operations, outreach, and advocacy: finding ways technologists can be of help. This article provides an overview about the ways we as technologists can support the fight for Universal Health Care.

Technical Support

Healthcare-NOW! is hosted in CiviCRM, an open source CRM system that is built on top of Drupal. The features and functionalities are based in PHP and has a very vibrant community maintaining it. The amazing thing about CiviCRM is that, just like in Drupal, one can import modules. If there were volunteer technical support to be provided on Healthcare-NOW!’s system to focus on updating and minor changes, it would help the organization immensely.

Click here if you would like to volunteer for Healthcare-NOW to help with their CiviCRM.

NationBuilder is the platform used by PNHP NY Metro chapter. Having limited staff, Katie Robinson — PNHP NY Metro Chapter’s Executive Director — mentions that support for their NationBuilder website will be very beneficial for the fight for Universal Healthcare, as it will alleviate much of the actions needed for their day-to-day, helping them focus on outreach.

Click here to express interest in helping to maintain their NationBuilder website

Awareness

One majore aspect of the campaign for universal healthcare is awareness. And organizations face multiple issues with this: First, there too little information or allowable literature out there about the current status of health care in the US, and how universal health care can truly solve much of the problems of the current system.

Second, people are not aware about how the current system affect real people. Storytelling is an integral part of the campaign for health care so there has got to be ways to make it easy for organizations to create stories that tell their personal experiences and how universal healthcare can really add value to their lives.

Thus, a great way to facilitate this is to provide people a way to submit content on their stories. This would allow a democratization of the content creation process, and will bring forth a great resource for health care organizations.

Click here to express interest in building the content submission tool

Health Care Calculators

Aside from that, there should be a way for organizations to have health care calculators that will effectively compute the difference between the current price of health care and of universal healthare. This will provide a more concrete evidence of the benefits of universal healthcare.

Click here to express interest in building the health care calculator

Peer-to-peer petitioning

Healthcare-NOW! Described Peer-to-peer petitioning as an individualized personal petition page for participants to send out their contacts. This will create a goal post for that person to fill out and will then help the cause to amplify because they’re driving their own campaign forward.

Stephanie Nakajima, Healthcare-NOW! Director of Communications, describe it as such:

We want to create a petition tool that would allow us to do online petition drives (an on-the-ground tactic that is super effective for base building). Healthcare-NOW NYC did a paper petition drive — “100 X 100” — in which they recruited 100 activists to “take the challenge” of getting 100 signatures each, bringing 10,000 more people into the movement. So people had a deadline to go to parks, rallies, whatever, to get their 100 signatures. At the end they had met their goal of 100,000 signatures — so you can see how this is a really powerful tool!

We envision this digitally as follows: there would be a main petition page on our website which would outline what the petition is about and allow people to sign. Standard online petition stuff. But once an individual signs the petition, that individual would have the choice of not only sharing the petition, but also of taking the “100 X 100” (or however many) challenge and making their own petition page.

The individual’s page would be a personalized petition gathering page — think like a GoFundMe, but instead of asking for money they’re asking for signatures/email addresses. The petition content/ask would be the same as on the main page, and all the signatures would ultimately go in the same pool, but it would:

1. have a picture/short personal appeal from the individual, explaining why this cause or petition ask is important to them

2. have a progress meter that would count how many people have signed this petition from the person’s page, so they can see how close they are to their goal.

Click here to express interest in building the peer-to-peer module for CiviCRM

Speaker Calendar

Another tool for awareness is having speakers talk about healthcare as frequent as possible, it has to then have a good mechanism to schedule speakers to those who request it, in order to spread the important word on universal healthcare. Whole Washington has been going around in different circles explaining why universal health care is so important, and with the appetite to learn more increasing, the need to effectively delegate speaking engagements is important. Providing a mechanism to schedule and assign speakers to speaking engagements helps make the process faster and easier to manage.

Click here to express interest in building the speaker calendar

Coalition Building

The idea of building coalitions is such an important force behind the push for health care because it begets collaboration and a more amplified voice in the process. Thus, finding allies and building collaborative spaces for organizations pushing for healthcare is an important task.

A great way for the organizations to push for healthcare is to speak constantly and endlessly about the benefits of universal healthcare. It is important that we provide spaces for these new collaborative relationships to thrive.

Another way we can be of support is to try to bring in much of the partnerships we have developed into their door and if there are any other partnerships that can be of value to them.

Click here to express interest in building partnerships

Capacity Building

Capacity building is brought on by the effectiveness of the awareness campaigns and coalition building exercises the organizations have created. Thus, we should be able to provide ways for them to maintain and harness capacity as effectively as possible.

Having a map of groups that will visualize the existing groups focused on healthcare can be a great boost for these organizations. It allows faster entry for people so that there’s a fast process of joining a group focused on universal healthcare.

Click here to express interest in building the groups map

One of the ideas brought about within the discussions are the training modules and being able to provide training modules to different types of speakers, volunteers, acters within the organization. This can be done through the toolkit mechanism we have created for Movimiento Cosecha or the Women’s March — if these organizations so choose to use it.

Click here to express interest in building the toolkit

A needs pipeline will allow the organization to express the ways their supporters can support them. Having a clear pipeline and a way for people to contribute will start an asynchronous process of getting things done for the organization.

Conclusion

There are a lot of ways for technologists to help in making universal health care a reality. Coders, designers, and other tech types have an immense skill that no one has in bringing millions and millions of people into learning, participating, and fighting for healthcare. Progressive Coders Network will continue to find ways for health care organizations and grassroots groups to find ways to be more efficient and effective in their processes.

Our members are ready to work together towards universal healthcare.