Latest Activities: HASC Support, City Calls, LA Homeless Cleanup Help, Medi-Cal, Postcard

We received some excellent help from the head of IT at the Hospital Association of California (an advocacy group ... and I would name them, but I forgot to ask if that was OK).  HASC had previously put out an email to all of their IT contacts - 360 of them, in hospitals, fire departments, etc., asking them to perform a "non-standard" query, based on the supposition that Nancy would be unable to relate her name or any other identifying information.  They admitted, however, that these emails come from "ReddiNet", and may be largely ignored by the target audience.  It was suggested that they would get more people to open them if it came from the police, so Detective Rosenberger was enlisted and happily sent out the request.  At the bottom of this post are the types of queries I am asking of people.

Our indefatigable callers continue to call the police, public guardians, and adult protective services of other cities in the west.  About a quarter of these calls are exercises in banging one's head against the wall - the shear lack of compassion that some people exhibit is enough to make you give up on humanity altogether - however, another quarter are people that take their own initiative to share the information broadly and truly try their best to help.

Nancy's father read an article in the Los Angeles Times about how they are putting more resources into crews that "cleanup" homeless encampments.  He had the idea that we should get the information about Nancy out to these crews, so I reached out to the department head of LA County for this, and he took an interest and promised to bring it up to his staff for suggestions (I also left him with about 800 business cards with Nancy's information - one side English, one side Spanish).

We continue to try to get MediCal to look at their records.  To recap, the LA Fraud Investigation unit has been doing queries for us for months.  However, they changed how they did the queries to make it less time consuming.  Since they changed the query, they have had no candidates.  (This makes some of us that have worked with databases before quite concerned that the query needs to be tweaked).  We have tried to get the same thing going at the state level, but so far our efforts along these lines appear to show a lack of understanding and/or coordination with the LA group. 

As I mentioned last time, we are working to create a postcard for another mailing.  We are working on getting a good-looking, eye-catching card with the right information, and to create a better mailing list (targeting care facilities).

Here is the type of database query I mentioned in the first paragraph:

Common Database Field	Suggested Query
Name	Jane Doe Subjects with the first name Nancy Any substitute name your institution might use for a Jane Doe
Social Security Number	Query based on what would be in the filed if left blank 000-00-0000 000-00-0001 888-88-8888  (Any SSN that starts with an 8 or 9 is "invalid") 999-99-9999
Date of Birth	If DoB is unknown, 01/01/xxxx is often put in, with xxxx representing the best guess for a birth year.  Looking from 1955 to 1965 should cover it An effective "fast query" could combine a couple of these ideas, for example, patients with the first name Nancy and date of birth 01/01/xxxx - if you get candidates, then look further for the date of admission, etc.
Date of Admission/encounter	October 15, 2016 through the present date
Physical Description	If any candidates are found using the above information, or based on your own ideas, Paulikas physical description is: Caucasian; Female; 5'7"; 140 Lbs (at time of disappearance); Blue Eyes, Size 9.5 feet; Light Brown/Gray hair; No tattoos or distinguishing marks