History

Dr. Larry Brilliant, a well-known preventive medicine and public health physician with a strong interest in technology, conceived of the idea for InSTEDD for his "One Wish to Change The World" award at the TED Conference in 2006. During his TED Prize acceptance speech, Dr. Brilliant shared his wish to develop an early detection and early response system that would serve to warn the world of developing threats, saving more lives through earlier, more collaborative and more effective alerting and response.

InSTEDD was organized in 2006-2007 to serve as a catalyst to empower individuals and organizations by using technology for more effective action in early warning, prevention and response to disasters and public health threats. The founder's vision was to build an organization that would help make the world safer by making technological innovations accessible to humanitarian and public health organizations working to conquer complexities of some of the world's most challenging realities.

For his TED Prize acceptance speech Dr. Brilliant created, as a small joke, an acronym that contained "TED" and used the large red TED logo to build INSTEDD: "International Networked System for Total Early Disease Detection". Soon thereafter, his wish became our current 501(c)3 nonprofit (with a modified acronym) created with initial funding from Google?s philanthropic arm, Google.org, which was then headed by Dr. Brilliant.

InSTEDD was incorporated in the State of California with the goal of serving as a catalyst to empower individuals and organizations by using technology for more effective action in early warning, prevention and response to disasters and public health threats. The founders' vision was to build an organization that would help make the world safer by making technological innovations accessible to humanitarian and public health organizations working to conquer complexities of some of the world's most challenging realities.

Under the guidance of Dr. Dennis Israelski, field visits to several of the Mekong Basin countries are completed and the decision is made to establish an innovation laboratory for field work in the Kingdom of Cambodia.

InSTEDD participates in Golden Shadow exercise, a public health/humanitarian response demonstration performed with local organizations near InSTEDD's headquarters in California. This is an event held in parallel with the larger State of California exercise called Golden Guardian.

The Mekong Collaboration Program is established with funding from Google.org & Rockefeller Foundation to support Mekong region countries and the Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance (MBDS) Network.

Published and distributed Influenza Pandemic Preparedness and Response A Citizen's Guide (Flu Manual).

InSTEDD is awarded non-profit status by the US Government.

First time use of GeoChat for a simulation exercise of Avian Influenza outbreak in Steung Treng Provence, Cambodia.

Agreement to start working in Mukdahan, Thailand, a key MBDS cross-border site with ChangeFusion as the implementing partner in Thailand.

Agreement to start working in Mukdahan, Thailand, a key MBDS cross-border site.

ChangeFusion is identified as implementing partner in Thailand.

We described an application of a light-weight synchronization platform for public health based on cloud computing and peer-to-peer architectures (Mesh4X). The significant value is demonstrated where epidemiologists can rapidly stand up a collaborative environment for data exchange and system interoperability, especially during outbreak investigation or responding to a disaster while operating in austere conditions.

ChangeFusion starts working in Thailand's Mukdahan province, testing GeoChat and assessing needs.

• InSTEDD participates in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) forum with the Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance network (MBDS). MBDS officially adopts GeoChat as a critical tool to support its mission to "build on past achievements to further enhance national and regional disease prevention and control".


• Global H1N1 (a.k.a. Swine Flu) outbreak announced.

• Cambodia starts using GeoChat with 100 staff to support information sharing related to the H1N1 virus (swine flu).


• Cambodia Center for Disease Control (CDC) uses GeoChat to send updates and information to Rapid Response Teams, starting with H1N1 alerting. As of mid-2010, the Cambodia CDC is continuing to use GeoChat for surveillance and response to outbreaks of acute diarrheal diseases.

InSTEDD begins development of an appointment reminder system in partnership with Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation and the Cambodian Ministry of Health (MoH) and NCHADS. Pilot sites begin in the Siem Reap and Battambong provinces of Cambodia.

Health centers in Mukdahan, Thailand pilot GeoChat for influenza-like illness (ILI) surveillance and other surveillance and response priorities.

MBDS cross-border site at the Savannakhet Provincial Health Department (PHD) starts using GeoChat to test for group communication improvement.

Thai Bureau of Epidemiology (BOE) starts using GeoChat to send out alerts and reminders as part of their nationwide influenza-like illness hospital surveillance system.

At the request of Thomson Reuters Foundation InSTEDD deploys Dr. Rasmussen and Director of Platform Engineering, Nicolas di Tada, to Haiti to deploy the AlertNet Emergency Information System.

Mukdahan starts using GeoChat to support a serious dengue outbreak -- validates InSTEDD's approach to focus on multi-use tools.

Shortcode for GeoChat announced in Thailand as a partnership between DTAC, ChangeFusion and InSTEDD.

InSTEDD participates in the first Bar Camp Yangon (Myanmar) -- at that point the largest Bar Camp in history with more than 3,000 participants.

ChangeFusion adds a second MBDS site in Thailand -- ChangRai and its counterpart Bokeo, Lao PDR -- to test GeoChat.

ChangeFusion works with the Thai Bureau of Epidemiology to strengthen a nation-wide 800-hospital based Influenza Like Illness (ILI) surveillance effort using SMS alerts/reminders through GeoChat.

First iteration of the InSTEDD developed web-based MBDS Scorecard (which tracks MBDS progress towards their goals) is released to MBDS in partnership with RAND.

Official launching ceremony of NCHADS Appointment Reminder System.

First general use shortcode announced between InSTEDD and SMART mobile in Cambodia to support GeoChat deployments and local innovation.

Many exciting GeoChat events took place this month, including:

• GeoChat fully translated into Lao language.


• InSTEDD deploys GeoChat at the provincial level in Cambodia.


• Bokeo Provincial Health Department (MBDS Cross-border site) started using GeoChat to support basic communication among provincial health staff and hospitals.


• Kampot Provincial Health Department (PHD) tested GeoChat for group communication.


• Kandal Provincial Health Department (PHD) started using GeoChat to support information-sharing between operational districts and health centers, as well as other communication needs.


• MBDS cross-border site in the ChiangRai, Thailand Province uses GeoChat to support communication with Surveillance and Rapid Response Teams (SRRTs), village health volunteers, livestock staff, provincial health staff and emergency medical response teams.

Office of Global AIDS Coordination Announces PEPfAR-sponsored initiative "Health Informatics Public Private Partnership" with InSTEDD as part of the founding management team.

InSTEDD designs and implements the innovative "Reporting Wheel" to support formal reporting of diseases from health centers in Mukdahan, Thailand.

In October of 2010, Cisco awarded a seed grant to InSTEDD for the development of technology designed to improve the resilience of community-level disaster response. This grant was for the development of a program to support shared safety, self reliance and situational awareness during a public crisis in the Bay Area.

In 2011, InSTEDD designed, developed, and pilot tested a tool, called Watchfire, to help the American Red Cross (ARC) improve their community level disaster response in the San Francisco Bay Area. Working closely with the ARC on a needs assessment, we learned that their highest priority was improving the speed and coordination of ARC’s Disaster Action Teams (DATs). Using an agile development process that involved the ARC in the cycle of building better and better technical solutions, we developed Watchfire, a simple and yet powerful system that initiates and tracks the process of building a volunteer response team with people who are geographically close to each other through phone calls and text messages.

April 2011

In April 2011, we began working with the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC DOHMH) on a project called ECHO: Electronic Communication for Health Operations.  The project was focused on helping the NYC DOHMH improve the ability of their Community Outreach Teams (COT) to gather emergency preparedness and response-related data in the field.  

These Community Outreach Teams teams deploy into local communities in order to share information as well as capture location-based data from those communities.  The goal of the ECHO project was to support the COT teams by allowing them to create and fill out electronic surveys on a handheld devices and then transmit that information back to the Emergency Operations Center for analysis -  in near real-time.  

Now, in situations that require an investigation (such as a potential disease outbreak) these teams will be able to create survey based forms and push them out to a team of people who each has their own Motorola Xoom tablet. The team will then collect answers to the survey by interviewing affected communities, and push them back to the server where they will later be able to export it to a Geographical Information System (GIS) tool.

You can watch a short video on the project here.

InSTEDD launches the second iLab located in Buenos Aires, Argentina with the goal of building technological capacity for addressing health, safety and sustainable development issues in the Latin American region.