Speaker Spotlight Q&A with Sarah Truckle, Director of Program and Strategic Operations at the State of Vermont's Agency of Human Services

She has graduate degrees in both law and environmental policy from Vermont Law School. In her role within the Secretary’s Office, she leads the agency’s integration and care coordination through complex case management, directing the systems-level coordination of agency resources and community partner services. Additionally, her work integrates the Agency’s strategic operations supporting programmatic and fiscal alignment. Outside of work Sarah enjoys baking cakes and pastries, reading fiction, and walking through Hubbard Park with her two sons.

Refining IT Infrastructure Initiatives to Further Aotearoa’s Digital Strategy

This is just one example, but the changes over the last few decades have been so dramatic that the “traditional concepts of things like property ownership and even our social fabric are being challenged.” And just like the industrial age was about “augmenting human strengths, the digital age is about augmenting human intellect.” As part of that, rather than the mass production of identical products, which was at the heart of the industrial revolution, “the digital era is characterised by personalisation and the tailoring of services to meet the needs of the many, the few and the individual.” Like the …

Harnessing Emerging Technologies for Citizen Outcomes

The Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) “provides whole-of-government technology and cybersecurity services across the SA government.” Due to the importance of the work, “the way we harness these emerging technologies is absolutely critical.” Therefore, at OCIO and across the entire public sector, “we’re not going to be harnessing anything new if our people don’t feel safe.” Despite all that humankind has been through and the fact that “our civilisations have changed dramatically over time, our brain has not evolved at the same pace,” particularly the amygdala, which is responsible for “emotional stress and our fight, flight or freeze …

Spotlight: Next Big Thing with Okta

The biggest trend we are seeing is the use of technology to secure and protect access to systems and peoples data. Businesses are really aware of the threat cyber security issues pose to their organizations in both terms of reputational risk and actual commercial loss. Previously this would be handled as a lower lever technology function, but today, from the board through senior management, protecting systems and access is top of mind. We do not see this changing, in fact we see it as becoming even more important as new threats emerge. The next big thing is the evolution of …

Advancing Digital Healthcare to Create Seamless Care Journeys

The global pandemic has been a health crisis to be sure, but it has also presented an opportunity for the healthcare industry, one that may not come around again. Though initially healthcare professionals – like almost everyone else – responded to the pandemic in a somewhat chaotic manner, eventually they found their stride, and with technology and great advances in medicines and the development of vaccinations, were able to care for their patients in a more informed way. This patient-centric care model that is underpinned by data and is values-driven is what is now expected across the healthcare sector. Data …

Delivering Healthcare to Remote Communities

The intention was for the care of patients to be as “uninterrupted as possible,” and this even included the publication of a “playbook and other resources to help physicians.” The first few months of the pandemic in remote locations led to a lot of lessons being learned, many of which “were not anticipated.” In Yukon for instance, in the northwest of the country, “we were very rapidly able to move to providing consultations either over a platform or over the phone, so that was excellent,” and the transition to virtual care was all but seamless. One of the positive but …

Public Sector Innovation Show – British Columbia

Jillian Carruthers says that the four principles of service transformation are: Despite these principles and the identified steps, there really is no guide, manual or playbook. This is emergent work and a lot of it we are processing by feel. Yet despite that, Kevin Ehrman says that service transformation is extremely important because services are how people experience government. Unfortunately though, most of the time it is reactive and generally not in a context which is too pleasant or desirable. This is particularly true and visible when it comes to emergencies. In BC for instance, after a flooding crisis, the …

Health Innovation

For years, the diversity of the residents and communities within the partnership produced a lot of data, though for a long time it was not used to its fullest extent. Nonetheless, it has always been a “real tapestry that shapes a lot of how we think about data quality, and how we work with our community.” Though the network operates independently, it is obviously part of the city of Toronto and part of the province of Ontario. Thus the health teams within Ontario decided to look at all the data that was being collected “to understand where our patients were …