Organizer and Catalist launch MobileHealthReach

SAN FRANCISCO, May 22, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- In less than five months millions of uninsured Americans will be able to enroll in subsidized healthcare exchanges.  Three months after that, every American is expected to have health insurance or pay a fine.

Given that millions of Americans have no idea that they are eligible for subsidized healthcare, an enormous, nationwide outreach is about to take place with organizations searching for an effective means of reaching uninsured Americans.

Easy-to-Run, Door-to-Door Outreach Using Free Smartphones

MobileHealthReach enables organizations to run paperless, door-to-door canvassing using smartphones controlled by a laptop.

"The system actually automates the administration of canvassing.  Data entry? -- gone.  Printing, collating, distributing, collecting and tearing down walk packets? -- gone.  Just hand out the phones, click 'launch' on the control panel and it works," says, Organizing Director of WFP, Mike Boland.   "I've been running canvasses on every system out there for more than a decade and there is nothing like this.  With the vast numbers of uninsured we need to reach, I don't see how it gets done without Organizer," he continued.

"If you want to reach people, there's is no system more effective than face-to-face outreach.  This is especially true when standard media channels are flooded with healthcare advertisements," says Catalist's CEO Laura Quinn. "Few organizations have the expertise, resources or technical knowledge to stand-up large scale canvassing efforts with so little time.  Organizer technology puts large-scale canvassing within reach."

Uninsured America: 3,141 counties, 3.6 million square miles

The CDC estimates that there are some 45 million uninsured Americans in over three thousand counties across the country. 

However, more than half of America's uninsured are concentrated in just 117 counties; like Cook County, Illinois with an estimated 780,000 uninsured, or Harris County, Texas with an estimated 1.1 million uninsured. 

Table 1 below shows the eleven counties in the US with the highest concentration of uninsured.  These eleven counties concentrate over 1.6 million uninsured Americans in 644 square miles, an area roughly the size of the city of Houston.

On the opposite end of this spectrum are the 62 rural Texas counties where over 30% of the residents are uninsured totalling 1.9 million Americans, including Webb County where 2 out of every 5 residents are uninsured.  However, the uninsured in these rural counties are distributed over 77 thousand square miles, an area equivalent to the entire state of Nebraska.

"The microtargeting techniques required to reach these communities are in the data," says Organizer's Founder and CEO, Ralph Garvin, Jr. "The challenge is to discover those data-driven techniques in a way that allows you to easily direct canvassers on the ground to knock on the right doors.  This is where we help."

Android Smartphones, meet Big Data

To reach underserved communities, you have to: (a) know where the uninsured are then you have to (b) develop and deploy an effective outreach system.

By putting a smartphone in the hand of every canvasser, we're taking the sophisticated techniques use in last year's Presidential race one step further.  Since each canvasser is connected wherever they are, they don't have to come back to a central office.  Helpful if you have to cover an area the size of Nebraska.

"Before Organizer, to get 100 canvassers out of the office and knocking on doors required a staff of about 6 to 8 people and a few dozen person-hours of preparation every day. Organizer allowed one person to do the same job in under an hour, on a laptop, while drinking coffee at Starbucks.  For such a massive effort, it only makes sense to use the Nation's best technology on the problem." says Chris Lee, President of Town Square Consulting and twenty-plus year campaign veteran.

Microtargeting & Healthcare in the Cloud

Organizer's field-system runs on Google's cloud infrastructure called App Engine and works by regularly processing millions data records, updating a microtargeting matrix in near real-time, which is then used to coordinate the efforts of hundreds of Android equipped canvassers, wherever they are, wirelessly.

The Android phones use built-in GPS to visually guide canvassers right to the door.  Then the worker, using the smartphone, can guide the resident through their healthcare options or simply conduct a survey.  All information is automatically captured and processed in real-time, enabling community organizations, health organizations and nonprofits to instantly see their results. 

"We want to make the most effective outreach techniques available by drastically reducing the complexity and cost of running door-to-door," says Garvin.

About Organizer
Organizer offers the most powerful and flexible solutions for field operations currently available.  Named the most innovated technology to come out of the 2012 election cycle, Organizer mobile cloud technology was deployed from coast to coast during last year's Presidential election.

About Catalist
Catalist's mission is to provide progressive organizations with the data and services needed to better identify, understand, and communicate with the people they need to persuade and mobilize.

Media Contact
Ralph Garvin, Jr.
[email protected]
877.870.7202

SOURCE Organizer