Our colleagues on the Predictive Healthcare team at Penn started work on a tool that would allow Penn to use compartmental modeling to do capacity planning. Penn Medicine leadership viewed the analysis as pivotal to understanding the potential burden of COVID-19 cases on their system and started sharing the tool with partners.

The Penn team realized that the app was likely to receive more traffic than their hosting platform could easily handle and reached out to Code for Philly for help hosting it somewhere else. Code for Philly is working with Penn to make the app scalable.

The CHIME app is tool for information seekers (folks who want to know what to expect with regards to the COVID-19 epidemic), decision makers (folks who can use the tool for information on what to expect and how to handle the epidemic), and content experts (folks who understand the analysis and help orgs make decisions).

The team at Penn is now receiving a large amount of requests for app development and code sharing with regards to this product. In order to focus on the work they needed to do, Code for Philly has been working to manage the open sourcing of the project.

We need help with:

  1. App development - python wizards
    • Hardening the code
    • Making it more flexible
    • Unit tests!
  2. App hosting - devops heroes
    • Maintain Penn’s instance
    • Ensure that repo is easy to host
  3. Feature development - math and stats friends
    • Improve documentation
  4. Consulting - devops & python
    • Help agencies use and set up their own instance

Interested in contributing?

The discussion is happening on Code for Philly’s slack workspace, in #covid19-chime-penn.