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A place to collect ideas for CfA health projects
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NOA Helper #74

Open daguar opened 9 years ago

daguar commented 9 years ago

BLUF: a simple service that to give food stamp recipients a friendly explanation of the confusing letters that they get in the mail

Problem explanation:

Project idea:

We could also MVP by just soliciting Balance users to send us NOAs they receive and offering to help if they need it.

lippytak commented 9 years ago

^ that. We should do that.

On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 11:24 AM, Dave Guarino notifications@github.com wrote:

BLUF: a simple service that to give food stamp recipients a friendly explanation of the confusing letters that they get in the mail

Problem explanation:

  • Food stamp recipients get a ton of confusing "NOAs" (notices of action) while applying and being enrolled in benefits (see a full timeline here http://lippytak.github.io/calfresh/ )
  • Many people get freaked out because the NOAs are incredibly confusing and make you think you're losing your benefits

Project idea:

  • A simple text message service
  • People text some information about the NOA they received; possibilities:
    • A picture (MMS)? [probably a nice concierging start]
    • A unique identifier? (like the NOA form code in the bottom right?)
    • A key phrase? (maybe the biggest text, or just text that we can search and uniquely identify)
    • The service responds with a friendly explanation

We could also MVP by just soliciting Balance users to send us NOAs they receive and offering to help if they need it.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/codeforamerica/project-ideas/issues/74.

Mr0grog commented 9 years ago

A unique identifier? (like the NOA form code in the bottom right?)

Is there a way to get structured data based on these or would you just be building your own database of what each form code represents? Also: are they unique enough (does every different situation have a different code) / not too unique (unique to each recipient, to dollar amounts, etc)?

Do you know the full range of notices that can be sent? If not, soliciting Balance users might be a good place to start/seed the database.

alanjosephwilliams commented 9 years ago

This would be a perfect project to precede the weekend NOA design sprint that @mollymcleod have tentatively put on the books Saturday 7/25. It would allow us to have really well defined use cases, and would probably make it much easier and/or faster to onboard other contributors that are less familiar with the SNAP program.

On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 12:07 PM, Rob Brackett notifications@github.com wrote:

A unique identifier? (like the NOA form code in the bottom right?)

Is there a way to get structured data based on these or would you just be building your own database of what each form code represents? Also: are they unique enough (does every different situation have a different code) / not too unique (unique to each recipient, to dollar amounts, etc)?

Do you know the full range of notices that can be sent? If not, soliciting Balance users might be a good place to start/seed the database.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/codeforamerica/project-ideas/issues/74#issuecomment-112176567 .

t: @alanjosephwilli p: 817 713 6264