North America

Health Informatics Public Private Partnership (HIPPP)

This public-private partnership between multiple agencies of the US government and several private organizations and NGOs was created in 2010 to promote health system strengthening within multiple developing countries. The approach is focused on first building local capacity in ICT portfolio management, architecture, and integration and then funding specific changes to health systems as planned by each country using these approaches. In addition to the in-country technology improvements, the HIPPP is funding the creation of a knowledge base of patterns, reference architectures and processes to share experiences, reduce risk, and improve the effectiveness of ICT beyond the initial countries. More information is available at http://hi-ppp.org/

ECHO: Electronic Communication for Health Operations (with NYC Health Department)

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.

Thomson Reuters Foundation Emergency Information Service (EIS)

This project centered around the development and deployment of disaster and post-conflict journalistic tools built on top of InSTEDD’s Riff collaboration and machine-based analytics software. Our prototype was tested in London, then field-tested in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, and deployed to Haiti for the January 2010 earthquake response.

The EIS service was part of an ecosystem of organizations and tools revolving around mobile services provided through the ‘4636’ shortcode. InSTEDD’s Nuntium message hub had direct connections to Comcel and Digicel, through which incoming aid requests were received in Hatian Creole, routed to Riff/EIS for analysis, shared with Crowdflower for translation, tagged and geocoded using local microwork organized by Samasource, and then forwarded to Ushahidi and other tools for further visualization and dispatch.

Then, using the EIS service, Thomson Reuters worked with NGOs and the Haitian government to send information messages to the population to help cope with subsequent threats and accelerate their recovery. We deployed as technical support for Alertnet within 48 hours of the earthquake and worked on the airfield in Port au Prince helping with the setup and use of the technologies.

We remained for the duration of the Search and Rescue phase of the emergency and received a US State Department letter of gratitude for our work with the UN Search and Rescue Dispatch Center.

Watchfire with American Red Cross and Cisco

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.

EpiInfo for the US Centers For Disease Control (CDC)

We used our Mesh4x tool to provide database synchronization to the US CDC’s EpiInfo software, a field epidemiology tool used globally for disease outbreak analysis. Mesh4x allows multiple simultaneous users of EpiInfo to work on data offline and share data with each other in peer-to-peer fashion or over cloud-based secure services. Additional adapters allowed automatic generation of GIS files for mapping applications, 2-way sync with Google Spreadsheets and larger relational databases, and to sync over 2-way streams of SMS messages. Ongoing development: CDC has allowed InSTEDD to redistribute the technology as open-source under the Mesh4x project.

Algorithms for Riff collaboration tool

Trinity College students involved in the Humanitarian Free and Open Source (HFOSS) initiative have created the mathematical algorithms needed for the machine-based analytics associated with InSTEDD’s Riff collaboration tool.

Golden Shadow — Public health and disaster response demonstration

Golden Shadow was our first field test of technologies and procedures selected to overcome some of the shortcomings of our current public health and disaster response systems. We worked with the California Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 3 (USAR 3) and the city of East Palo Alto to perform a technical demonstration as part of the Golden Guardian exercises. The scenario involved the rapid onset of a disease affecting multiple populations, with bio safety and CERT units helping report its spread and acting for its containment. The fist prototype of GeoChat was tested at Golden Shadow and it showed its ability to keep teams coordinated and headquarters informed as well as highlighting areas where the Incident Command System (ICS) may need to evolve to incorporate the interaction with volunteers and community members more effectively into official response protocols.

US Veterans Administration — Maximizing use of technology to improve the early detection of disease

We have provided consulting to the VA on the use of web-monitoring tools, social media aggregation analysis and collaborative decision support technology to improve the early detection of disease events. The focus is on diseases that are significant at the level of the clinician, facility and the whole system. We did this in a way that complies with the VA’s security constraints and can be integrated with the ESSENCE system.

UNICEF Emergency Operations Center (EOC)

We have contributed to the development of the Emergency Operations Center for UNICEF in New York through the efforts of our adjunct staff member, SB Chatterjee. SB’s efforts have resulted in significant changes in process and workflow within the EOC and an expansion of their capabilities for global monitoring and analysis. The technology includes deployment and customization of CMS servers to add alerts, GIS and document repository capacities in the context of events being followed by UNICEF.

Influenza Pandemic Preparation and Response — A Citizen’s Guide V2.0

The Flu Manual was originally created in 2007 to serve as a comprehensive educational guide for Avian Influenza (also known as Bird Flu and H5N1) with the target audience being the individual, their family and their community. In May of 2009 the Guide was updated to incorporate information about the H1N1 (“Swine”) influenza outbreak. The majority of information that exists within the public sector on pandemic influenza is designed for technical and medical experts and is very difficult to digest if one does not have prior knowledge about influenza. The Flu Manual serves to educate individuals about all stages of an influenza pandemic: from background and planning, to treatment of symptoms and response, to recovery.

Additional Links: Get the flu manual

Tracker News

TrackerNews.net is an aggregator with a few twists. Its beat covers health issues, humanitarian work, and technology that supports both and is broadly defined. TrackerNews is about the mix and match of news, research, and innovation. It is a medium as well as a resource.

Additional Links: www.trackernews.net