Resilience Meeting Discussing Pandemic Preparedness, H1N1, and Open Communications
Yesterday’s meeting at the White House on H1N1 preparedness focused heavily on openness and information sharing. Officials and experts talked about how policy impacts the ability to share information and how it can be modified to better facilitate it, how engagement at all levels of the government and with the private sector will improve access to needed information, and how new surveillance techniques can be used to help thwart a pandemic.
Dr. Mike McDonald talking at the meeting.
The group identified its main goals, beginning with the short term goal of developing a set of anonymous data points that can be used to monitor cases of H1N1 flu publicly, followed by developing tools to effectively communicate this information. Their last – and main – goal is to get this information to the government and other agencies helping to treat flu cases and possible infection points as well as with the public at large.
Also discussed at the meeting was the “Race to Resilience: Pandemic Information Sharing Initiative,” which aims to improve preparedness through information sharing and collaboration between the private sector and all levels of government. Chris Allen, a CTO of the Department of Homeland Security, spoke about the initiative and of the findings of several groups looking at how to best address these two approaches. It was also announced that the initiative will deliver a plan to Aneesh Chopra, the federal CTO, on September 1 laying out a plan on how to achieve, part of which includes how an open source framework can facilitate the collaboration.
I’ll write more on the pandemic preparedness happening at the White House next week, as it’s clear that a lot is moving there.
Can you tell us more about
Can you tell us more about the “new surveillance techniques”
From decentralized data collection to social media monitoring
Re: surveillance techniques, people are looking at existing technologies ranging from decentralized data collection tools, to ways structured data (read: xml/rss/atom) can help improve transmission of information, to different social media monitoring tools. Underlying all of these is a push for a network centric approach to dealing with problems, where tools that are already being used are tapped for these purposes as much as possible. Obviously there are some gaps that are going to require new tools. Where there are capability gaps, efforts are being made to identify open source frameworks to power the cores of the new tools.
We are especially interested in ways we can make something like a “preparedness in a box” toolset for small and medium sized businesses that has an out of the box preparedness plan for organizations to quickly customize. Something like this would need to be flexible, with specific tools for certain trigger points already built in, so that for instance if a crisis happens, the package can become a messaging portal for the organizations to send out SMS/IM alerts to staff. For a prolonged business slow-down, it could act as a virtual collaboration space so teams can work remotely. We are also thinking a lot about news monitoring apps and dashboards that show aggregate snapshots of the news to decision makers, largely based on our experience from working with www.ManagingNews.com.