PARTNER PROFILE
Cody, the Santa Clara County health
commissioner, and the current New
Orleans health commissioner Jen Avegno.
Like others across the nation, they have
been making a difference even in the
face of limited resources and historic
challenges. They and others have set a
great example of what it means to show
strategic leadership and use stature to
encourage partnerships across sectors.
Can you give us a thumbnail of Public
Health 3.0, especially since COVID-19?
Public Health 3.0 refers to a new era of
enhanced and broadened public health
practice that goes beyond traditional
public department functions and
programs. It was a signature project for
me and my team and we released the
vision paper in the fall of 2016 while I was
serving in the Obama Administration.
It grew from my own experiences as
New Orleans health commissioner from
listening sessions with hundreds of front
line public health and community leaders
across the country.
There are five core areas identified
that lead to a 21st century local health
department: 1) Chief health strategiststyle
leadership; 2) Cross-sectoral
collaboration with strategic partners;
3) Performing essential functions as
part of accreditation; 4) Modern data
infrastructure and digital approaches; and
5) Flexible funding.
It is precisely the foundation that would
have been helpful for public health
in this time of crisis. Though many
states and localities have adopted the
model, the weaknesses in the data and
financing models have made response
to COVID-19 a challenge. Increasingly,
public health leadership across the
country is calling for modernization
and use of this vision as the framework,
including the funding model of the
Public Health Infrastructure Fund.
Technology has traditionally been a
stumbling block for public health. What
can be done to remove the difficulties?
It is widely accepted that the data
infrastructure supporting public health is
wildly outdated. It struggles to meet the
needs of today, even pre-pandemic. To
remove roadblocks, we need to see a lot of
collaboration with the private sector, and
recognition from healthcare leaders in
the US that there is a need to modernize
public health infrastructure. APHL has
demonstrated that it is possible to partner
with big tech companies like Apple,
Microsoft and Google, and leverage their
data and technology to augment the work
of public health. Technology companies
shouldn’t be the ones proposing
recommendations, but rather sharing
information with our public health
partners to empower them to do so.
As public health data becomes more
available, how can public health address
long-standing disparities in treatment
and care for underserved and unserved
populations?
You can’t manage what you can’t
measure. The data available to public
health for routine surveillance of
communities is often stale by the time
they obtain it, making it difficult to act
on. For instance, the Secretary of Health
might be working with, and making
decisions, based on 2-3 year old data.
Emerging partnerships, including ones
coming to head during COVID-19 between
public health and sectors like medicine
and technology, make for better data
sharing and more access to information
in real time. This better addresses the
needs of marginalized populations, whose
members may have more trust in public
health than the medical system. This is
one of the reasons we are partnering with
Morehouse through the Satcher Institute,
to develop a better equity surveillance
system.
APHL has partnered with Google
and other tech companies to provide
exposure notification technology. How
will this help public health agencies
support their communities?
Our partnership with Apple and APHL
on exposure notifications is a perfect
example of how tech companies can
partner to augment the important
work of public health. As public health
agencies have rolled out traditional
forms of contact tracing in response to
the pandemic, we’ve seen modern-day
challenges that we needed to adapt
to. For example, people often don’t
answer unknown calls which might be a
notification from public health.
Through our partnership, mobile devices
can be used in an automated and scalable
way to help determine who has been
exposed to a person that later reports
a positive diagnosis of COVID-19. For
example, they can be used to send a
rapid notification to the exposed person
with instructions on next steps. These
notifications can be beneficial by alerting
an exposed individual faster than they
would be notified via conventional
contact tracing. They’ll enable public
health authorities to contact and provide
guidance to the individual and, where
appropriate, include them in conventional
contact tracing efforts. Without the
national server from APHL, each state
implementing the technology would be
responsible for its own datasets. APHL’s
involvement makes it possible for this
program to support every state public
health agency.
We’re so thankful APHL is a partner
to Google and Apple on our exposure
notification effort by building and hosting
a national key server in partnership with
Microsoft. This will help to ensure our
exposure notifications are effective as
users travel across state lines. APHL staff
and the board have shown tremendous
leadership in this and other ways during
the pandemic. n
Dr. DeSalvo will give the Dr. Katherine
Kelly Distinguished Lecture, “Public
Health 3.0: A 21st Century Model
for 21st Century Challenges” on
Wednesday, October 7 at 1:00 pm ET
at the APHL 2020 Virtual Conference.
Learn more and register.
PublicHealthLabs
@APHL
APHL.org
Summer 2020 LAB MATTERS 11