Riverside County Health Informatics
On any given day in Riverside County, with a population over 2.3 million, roughly 2,310 people are homeless. Much of the data is gathered by local officials and volunteers annually through the Point in Time (PIT) counts and are reported to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The majority of funding for homeless services in Riverside, $9.9 million, comes from HUD. This year, new funding from the California Homeless Emergency Aid Program, will inject an additional $9.7 million. This creates a unique and pressing opportunity for transformative change.
PiLabs is collaborating with Riverside County as a Continuum of Care partner to help bring about such change. Working closely with the County, PiLabs will develop and deploy a data science platform that will help to integrate and analyze homelessness data and better inform policy and funding allocation. Students participating will be instrumental in evaluating, deploying, and testing software and tools for this platform. As part of their service learning activities, students will also participate in the field by volunteering to help conduct the annual PIT counts.
Interested? Contact Paea LePendu.
Dr. LePendu’s research over the past eight years has focused on the health and well-being of people through the large-scale analysis of electronic medical data, making significant contributions in pharmacovigilance and electronic phenotyping. Recently, Dr. LePendu has shifted focus slightly toward the fusion of social and environmental data with the patient record, the social determinants of health. His recent work on the integration of health and criminal justice data, for example, has informed public policy for the severely mentally ill within the Maricopa County (AZ) justice system. His current area of interest focuses on health and homelessness, an issue that is also highly associated with frequent emergency room visits and hospital readmissions and places significant burden on our national health system.
For more information or to join this exciting project, please contact Dr. LePendu. PiLabs is currently recruiting for undergraduate data scientists who are excited to do good.