How public health can build a “one health” infrastructure for the future

Public health challenges—like antibiotic resistance, vector-borne disease and a global pandemic—have eluded traditional public health tools and frameworks. As a result, public health leaders focus more and more on the intersection between the environment and human health. Searching for a better framework to understand emerging threats to human health, many in public health circles have united around the “one health” paradigm.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) defines one health as “an approach that recognizes the health of people is closely connected to the health of animals and our shared environment.” Although one health isn’t a new idea, “one health” gained a lot of traction during the pandemic. Scientific consensus leans toward COVID-19 being a disease of zoonotic (animal-to-human) origin. Frighteningly, COVID-19 is hardly alone in that respect; according to the United Nations Environment Program, a new zoonotic disease appears every four months in humans.

An understanding of one health both equips us with an explanation and points us to a solution for these ailments. For instance, the worrying increase in new zoonotic diseases is at least partially the result of human encroachment into areas traditionally left to nature. These wildlife interactions lead to close contact with animals and humans; more chances for disease to spread. Vector-borne diseases are rising due to warmer temperatures and antibiotic resistance is partially being caused by the industrial use of antibiotics in animal agriculture, to name a couple of examples.

The CDC has defined a way to respond to these public health risks as one health. One health calls for a “collaborative, multisectoral and transdisciplinary approach—working at the local, regional, national and global levels—with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment,” as the CDC puts it. At the highest level, action on climate change, sustainable approaches to industrial animal agriculture and a policy of renaturation will do the most to counter environmental threats to human health. But even in the most optimistic scenarios, one health informs us that these risks will continue to increase.

To identify, track and stop the next pandemic will require global, national and local coordination between governments, health care providers, NGOs and other organizations. To potentially stop the next COVID, critical information—including relevant environmental data—must be allowed to flow quickly and freely between public health authorities.

Much of the responsibility for realizing this vision will rest on local and regional public health authorities’ shoulders. However, many public health departments have yet to even digitize their data collection processes, much less enable the infrastructure for robust data capture and sharing. Here’s an agenda for public health technologists to help prepare their organizations for a one health-informed future:

• Digitize workflows: Pen-and-paper methods for collecting data on possible outbreaks are far too inefficient to be useful. Public health departments must prioritize digitizing workflows so data can be quickly and accurately captured.
• Standardize data: Simply having the data doesn’t mean it’s in a usable state. Public health technologists should coordinate with national and international authorities to ensure their data is formatted in accordance with global standards so it can be combined and analyzed alongside data from other authorities.
• Eliminate data siloes: Unless you’ve made a concerted effort to eliminate data siloes, there’s likely important data that a subset of your organization has access to that other teams don’t even know about. Eliminating data siloes within a public health department avoids reduplication of efforts and inconsistencies in the data that will ultimately be shared with other authorities.
• Enable interoperability: Digitizing workflows, standardizing data and eliminating data siloes are all critical steps toward the ultimate goal, which is achieving interoperability. The final step for public health technologists is to upgrade their tech stacks, either by buying a solution or creating their own, to ensure that they can both share their data with, and access data from, centralized public health repositories.

The above agenda items sound like a lot of work because they are. But one strategy that can significantly lesson the burden is leveraging low-code solutions. Low-code application development platforms (LCADPs) allow non-technical users and programmers alike to define application logic using a graphical user interface (GUI) to create fully functioning apps. In a recent survey, over half of IT, digital and businesses leaders agreed that low-code development is at least 40 percent faster than traditional development.

That’s precisely the kind of boost public health technologists need to help shore up their technology and processes for the one health future. And with the recent emergence of LCADPs targeted at the public health market offering full HIPAA compliance as well as robust pre-built modules, public health leaders should strongly consider incorporating low code into their one health preparedness approach.

Ted Hill is the senior vice president of sales and marketing at SSG. He served as a project manager with 25+ years of experience directing and managing operations and logistics. In recent years, he has been a project manager for a variety of state public health information technology (IT) initiatives to modernize processes and systems including Early Intervention, health care exchange (HIX) and MMIS.