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TIMOTHY JORDAN: Hello, I'm Timothy Jordan,
and welcome to The Developer Show.
I'm standing here with Kathy Pham who has a very long title.
I'm going to get it right.
It's Health Data Adviser and Product Manager
at the US Digital Service.
Welcome to the show.
KATHY PHAM: Thank you.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Let's talk about the US Digital Service,
and let's do it as engineers do.
What's the problem statement?
KATHY PHAM: So the problem statement
is to solve the technology problems that face
the federal government today.
It's all revolved around thinking of a way
to use technology, or changing the technology that's
in place, to make services better for the American people.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: The way I've heard
you describe it before and, sort of, seen it online
is it's like a startup within the government.
KATHY PHAM: Yep.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And it's such a cool idea.
KATHY PHAM: It's amazing.
It's been known as the President's tech startup,
so it's great that we had the backing of the President.
And it's very much a startup inside the government.
We've had to build our entire hiring pipeline,
figure out our mission, figure out
what projects we're going to work on, prioritize.
And yeah, it's very much a little tech startup,
just like you'd have out here in the Bay Area,
inside government.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: If you achieve everything
you want to over the next, say, two years,
how does the government look different for everyday people?
KATHY PHAM: It shouldn't matter to you that we're
25 different agencies.
You should just have a seamless, awesome experience.
What that would mean is that you have delightful experiences
when you want to bring a family member into the US.
It is easy to find information, and you can figure out really
quickly if you were to help a sibling or a child figure
out what university in your area and what field of study
to go to so that they have the best chance of success.
And it means that our vets can get
the care they need when they need it,
and they're not waiting two years to get basic care
or to get mental health help or to get any of the services
that they absolutely deserve.
And some of that is much bigger than a tech problem.
Some of it's underlying, other underlying issues,
but we'll fix what we can at the tech level to get them there.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: I read your Medium post,
and I was really touched about your relationship
with your brother and your mother
and the United States of America.
And I wanted to ask you, how did all those things come together
at just the right time to drive you into this service?
KATHY PHAM: I worked on Google Health for a little while.
I built data warehouses for hospitals, and did this work,
and still was enjoying my time, and was
kind of going along in my career,
didn't really know where that would go,
and got a call from Mikey Dickerson one day.
He was one of the integral people
in the healthcare.gov team that turned
around the healthcare.gov website
when it was basically unusable back in 2013.
It was all over the news.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: I remember that.
KATHY PHAM: And it became stable.
And so he gave me a call and was like,
I need someone who knows health care and data.
Can you come help?
And here I am today, taking everything
that I've accumulated, whether it's
the experience I saw from my mom, the experience I had
in computer science and software engineering, the empathy
that I have for my little brother, all of that
has really contributed to this role here in the United States
Federal Government, which is, like,
the biggest public service project you can possibly do.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: If you'd like to learn more about the US Digital
Service, check out their website and the Medium publication,
both linked below.
Is there anything else that they should
do if they want to get, say, even more involved?
KATHY PHAM: Yes.
So one way to get involved is to apply directly
at the whitehouse.gov/usds or 18f.gov,
or look into the Presidential Innovation Fellows program,
where we bring some of the best entrepreneurs in the country
into government to solve problems.
Or join a local government, look into Code for America
where Fellows are deployed across the country
to solve their local governments.
Or better yet, if you want to keep your day job,
contribute to any of the open source projects
that we have because that's a thing now.
We have our code out on GitHub for many
of the different projects.
You can go and contribute to that code base
and have your code become part of the federal government
and contribute to making America better.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
Thanks for joining me today, Kathy.
KATHY PHAM: Yeah, thank you.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And don't forget to check out
all the links below.
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