Connect and Innovate: Improving Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response through Engagement and Challenge Competitions

Background/Purpose: The Fusion Cell in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response is working to enhance engagement and stimulate ideas for technology innovation for improved public health emergency preparedness and response. Challenge competitions are a unique method for proposing problems to the general public and awarding contestants for innovative solutions.

Methods: In November 2011, the Fusion Cell hosted a forum for State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial (SLTT) public health representatives to discuss their approaches to public health situational awareness and the gaps they encounter. Ideas for improvement were captured during roundtable sessions.

Results/Outcomes: A repeated theme among the SLTT attendees was their desire to incorporate non-traditional data sources, like open source and social media, into their surveillance systems, but they lack time and resources to cut through the noise and make sense of the data. Mistrust of these information sources is a driving force in keeping social media tools out of the public health practitioner toolbox and remains a major barrier to improved situational awareness.

Conclusions: Several ideas for tools and technologies that could improve social media utilization by SLTT agencies were proposed, such as: tools that follow trends or summarize general ‘feelings' about a health issue; tools that separate “noise” from signal; technologies that verify rumors or check validity; and tools that generate a baseline of social media health data. Fusion Cell plans to announce a Challenge Competition in early 2012 to address one or more of the ideas generated by the Fusion forum participants.