Procurement and Vendor Evaluation

The Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) wanted to build a software tool that could help schools in California purchase more nutritious, locally farmer-grown food. Yousef Buzayan, CAFF's farm to cafeteria program manager, reached out to USDR for help.

USDR provided a surge of technical expertise to complement CAFF’s experience by introducing CAFF to agile software development, product thinking, and user research, executing 18F's De-risking Guide created by USDR staff members Waldo Jaquith and Robin Carnahan when they worked together at 18F.

Marin County’s Behavioral Health & Recovery Services reached out to USDR to partner on the overall digitization effort across their office. After learning more about their workflows, the team chose to focus on the Electronic Health Records system that the fiscal team uses to administer payments for Medi-Cal, Medicare, and Medicaid.

USDR volunteers reviewed the team's workflow, interviewed team members, documented their existing data workflow, helped them identify their weak links, gaps and sources of missed communication. From this discussion, we helped them derive a wireframe of the specification for an EHR system that they can procure to integrate the various modules and entities sharing and consuming information.

The Peer Power Foundation is a Memphis area nonprofit that hires, trains, and pays college students to mentor and tutor middle and high school students. To counteract an estimated 1 year of learning loss among Tennessee’s 1.1M public school students, Peer Power sought to ramp up their tutoring capacity by enrolling and training tutors online.

USDR worked with the team to identify their top needs from a learning management solution and surveyed the field for the best fit.

In early 2021, the City of Milwaukee Health Department asked USDR for help replacing their Quickbase system. Due to licensing issues and cost, they knew that they were not getting the full utility of the tool and wanted to identify another platform that better fit their needs and budget.

In collaboration with the team, a USDR volunteer scored 8 different no code database platforms across 45 possible criteria. They ranked the tools and landed on a top choice that met the department’s HIPAA compliance and pricing requirements with high scores on user friendliness and documentation.