Inspired To Heal
Stories of clinicians, educators, innovators, and researchers who built or led programs of excellence in government health institutions. Each guest has excelled in clinical medicine, program building, or public health. They persevered and succeeded through a clear vision, collaboration, and a passion for the mission of government-run health systems. Their stories will inspire those seeking change in their own organizations.
Inspired To Heal
Community Informed Informatics
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Numbers tell a story, but they rarely tell the whole story. Claire Dillavou, PhD, has made a career out of building and revising public health surveillance systems informed by the most critical variable: Community Context. The community revealed the story behind the numbers, one of the many lessons she learned that informed her successful public health informatics career at the LA County Department of Health, CDC, and ARPA-H.
A public health informatics visionary, she describes her work in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Los Angeles County Jail, and in partnership with Uber to advance corporate-public health partnerships.
Intro and Outro music composed by Kevin MacLeod and downloaded at https://incompetech.com/
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Inspired to Heal, Season 2, Public Health Stories. Foundational to Public Health is collecting data to determine whether an outbreak is occurring and whether programs are effective. Today's guest, Claire Delavoux, is an expert in public health data systems. She was Chief of Epidemiology and Data and Director of Vaccine Preventable Disease Control for the LA County Department of Health. She's now the Managing Director for AI and Data at Accenture. Claire, welcome to Inspired to Heal.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_02After completing your undergraduate degree, you did the Peace Corps in Nicaragua. How did that background get you interested in a public health career?
SPEAKER_01So the Peace Corps really shaped, like I learned real community in public health. And that's a very humbling experience. And really understanding different cultures. You know, I think it's a great thing to for young adults to go to when they're kind of trying to shape their understanding of the world and where they sit in it. So I came out of there saying, oh yeah, I'm pretty sure I want to go to get a master's in public health and got into Columbia. So I was living in New York and working for an NGO and did some UN stuff. So I was working while I was going to graduate school, which was not really calm. I mean, you know, flying off to Africa.
SPEAKER_02When you say you work for an NGO, could you just tell us what is meant by NGO?
SPEAKER_01Non-governmental organization, so nonprofit basically, but internationally.
SPEAKER_02And you said that led you to Africa.
SPEAKER_01Yes. I started working in Southern and Eastern Africa and Congo and absolutely loved it. I had this wonderful British boss who actually came to my wedding and gave a really embarrassing speech. But you know, there's nothing like being young and thinking you can change the world and grad school and flying off and doing things that are probably you shouldn't be invited into the room to do, and feeling good about and having a British boss being like, you know, you're perfectly adequate. You know, no superlatives. Really like keeping your ego in check and teaching you that you really just don't know anything. I asked her for a recommendation and she literally wrote, Claire is perfectly adequate. And I'm like, no, in America we use superlatives. Like, I need to get into grad school. And she's like, oh, fine. But she liked me.
SPEAKER_02What you've described so far doesn't sound like someone who wanted to become a data geek, but maybe you you would claim that title.
SPEAKER_01I'm a nerd. I mean, I think I used to be more of a data nerd. I learned when you when you have money and you're working in the field, you have to report on that, right? So um, we built lots of systems and you work in a lot of evaluation and programs to see if they're making an impact. One of the things that really turned me on to this, I think in Peace Corps, I learned a lot of humility and empathy and understanding that it's really important to learn other people's lived experiences and to understand them for anything to be successful. And I think working for the different NGOs, I learned that the data is very important, but the context around that is more so maybe. So we had a program in southeastern Congo, and it was investment in having women becoming financially more stable because we knew that they invested money back in children's health and to the community at a higher rate than the men there. So it was looking at health outcomes, but using economic development as kind of the driver. And so there kind of was this great initial year, the first year of the program where things were kind of on track and they were meeting metrics that we would expect. And people were going to the clinics and there was uptake of vaccines, and you know, women were building businesses and taking more food to market and making more money. And then we just saw this, you know, weird level out for like a year and a half. And it just didn't make sense. And I kept looking through all the reports, and you know, my French is pretty bad, and then they translate to English. So I go back and forth, like maybe there's something lost in translation. And so finally, I was like, I just on my next trip, I need to go to Lubembashi and see what's going on. So when I was down there, I was asking all of these women, and they said, Well, yeah, of course we're making more money and we go to markets further and further away, but we don't raise the prices. And I, you know, my little capitalistic young mind was like, but why not? And then you would make more money, and that's the point of this economic development program. And they said, Well, you know, 25% of our community has HIV and they need to eat because they're, you know, dying and, you know, their families need to eat and they're trying to save money to take them to the clinics. And why would we raise prices? Because it's community. And they walked me through how they would, you know, raise prices on faraway markets where they went to to be able to subsidize giving away free food that they were growing. It shook out in the data that we were collecting that was not really informed with the local context, really just looking at the outcomes we were interested in. But really, the nuance and the intricacies in it was where all the amazing things were happening and the community was taking care of itself. For me, it was a big learning moment of data's great, but context is actually the most important thing to do with that data.
SPEAKER_02What a wonderful story about trying to understand the context behind the numbers. And to have learned that so early in your career was, I'm sure, a very impactful experience.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and you really kind of learn that there's so many things that aren't measured that are unquantifiable or they may be quantifiable, but they haven't been measured. And and that's really in public health so much of the important stuff.
SPEAKER_02But getting into the field, I'm sure your next report, you probably highlighted that. And it was probably appreciated that, yeah, you dug into the meaning.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So you recognized I have to get good at this, I have to build a system. How did that then progress? Did you decide, oh, this is it for me? I really enjoyed building this.
SPEAKER_01I just realized, oh, building better systems to measure things that were interested in impacting is kind of what I'm good at. And then after I graduated with my master's, I took a fellowship with CDC Gap at the time, the Global AIDS program. But it was PET Farm. And I went down back to Southern Africa to Namibia. The first week I got there. I think there was a huge outbreak on the Angolan-Namibian border of Marburg. I went up there and I got to see actually EIS officers and some WHO people working that.
SPEAKER_02The World Health Organization and CDC were there to investigate Marburg virus, a virus similar to Ebola virus and in the group of hemorrhagic fever viruses. Marburg virus getting its name from Marburg, Germany, when in 1967 there was a laboratory accident involving monkeys imported from Africa in which Marburg virus was transmitted to workers.
SPEAKER_01You know, asking the right questions and being curious and kind of trying to understand the lip experience of the people that we're trying to work with was really important. So we had prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV and early ART rollout across the country. And so building the systems to be able to monitor that, look at health outcomes. Yeah, I think I got good at asking the right questions. So I remember one time we were trying to do something for national HIV testing day, and we forged partnerships with all these people, the national, um, the telecom services. And then, you know, they're like, okay, great, we'll send out some messages, whatever, whatever. And some guy made some offhand comment about, yeah, but only so many people are gonna get it. And I said, Wait, what are you talking about? He's like, Well, you know, people have like five SIM cards, and then they every different telecom company is running a different special. They do weekend SIM cards and then they do weekday, and then there's one phone per family, and then everyone pops them in. So it really matters what day and what time of day, depending on the audience that you want to get. I just sat with them for like two hours and just downloaded his bread. I was like, this is fascinating. I never would have known this. We would have just sent out some blanket message. Finding those key people who understand the nuance for the population that you're really trying to reach is so essential and being curious.
SPEAKER_02When was this? You're talking about people in Namibia having cell phones and your surveys going through cell phones, which might have been happening there before it happened in the United States.
SPEAKER_012006 to 2009, a lot of flip phones. The you know, the interesting thing that I kind of learned in a lot of developing countries is in the US, we have this big built-up infrastructure, which is wonderful and great. But because of that, there's this kind of sunk cost mentality to a lot of things. And a lot of countries I worked, innovation and solutioning and people just being willing to try things, it was just so much easier for them to be like, okay, yeah, that sounds great. Because there wasn't this sunk cost into this huge infrastructure. So things on cell phones happened so much more quickly. You could transfer money, you could get send, oh, here, you know, I'll take a taxi, we'll send all these things, messages to people. When I came back to the US, I'm like, why are we so behind? What's happening? But it was all, you know, in flip phone kicks, but it it worked. We still have that. I think there's still this kind of reticence to move away from this. I think AI is facilitating this rapidly, um, at least in the US, but there has been for a long time, particularly in public health, with these huge data systems and doing things in legacy of moving rapidly and changing because of this sunk cost mentality, which really inhibits innovation.
SPEAKER_02I feel like I've been on both sides of this sunk cost mentality. The idea that people are hesitant or reluctant to abandon a technology or a solution that they've put a lot of money into, and so they keep pouring money into that solution even if it isn't the best idea. If it's something you developed, you have that strong urge to continue to foster and maintain a system, even when perhaps the correct thing would be to abandon that technology and start anew. Yeah. So in Los Angeles, you became the director of epidemiology and data for communicable diseases. Going from Africa to LA, which, you know, is California, there's quite a bit of technological innovation occurring. Did you find that the health department had kept up?
SPEAKER_01It's antiquated. It's a very interesting structure. It's very convoluted how it is in the U.S. Every state is different and every county. And LA County is 10 million people, but because we're so big, really no one had like gone around and systematically kicked the tires and been like, what are we doing here? And why do is this system still exists for a reason? Is it giving us what we need? Can we rethink surveillance? Maybe we take certain diseases off the table first. And so Sharon Balter came in from New York City, and she hired me. She's like, Your job is reinvent surveillance. Go through, figure out what's happening. So we started doing that, but then we always had outbreaks, like large ones. So you kind of get sidetracked. I had hired a great epidemiologist, and we were just beginning this process. We're mapping everything out and going out into the field and figuring out from the beginning of the data flow to the end how things were happening. And, you know, there's about 94 reportable diseases and conditions in LA County. So for each one, we were going to do this. And then we had a huge mumps outbreak at the LA County Men's Jail, which is the largest jail in the world. It started in this one unit, the K6G, which was the LGBT unit, but it had spread. So we went over to talk to them and see what was happening. The only reason we got alerted was the one of the main wardens' daughters, a doctor at Kaiser, and had called his daughter and she said, Call the health department. Like, why are you calling me? You know, jail's population movement is every day. We went in there and they were pretty open and said, Okay, can you come in and fix this and and deal with this outbreak? And we said yes. And we kind of moved there for two months. Eventually we did a huge vaccine uh rollout. And the interesting thing was their system was a DOS-based system. This is 2019. We went to the people who run the system and my epidemiologist, because as you know in public health, if you're a really good epidemiologist, you're kind of also an informatician and you build tech, you do all the things, right? Because out of necessity. It's not beautiful, it's not gonna fly off the shelves in Silicon Valley, but it it works. But they didn't know what inmates were where and who was being released and who's being intake. And Rebecca just sat and took over their entire system. And we said, listen, the only way this is gonna be controlled is if we can quarantine groups of people and not have certain people work across different quarantined units. Uh, so the workers, the staff, and that can be a hard sell. Somehow we did it. And for about two months, Rebecca was in charge of movement in the LA County Men's Jail. And we would go in and put up big signs and say, this is quarantine, do not take anyone out of here or let them in, because there's a time period in which that you're exposed, that you have to get through that. This was before we were able to roll out the whole vaccine campaign. And you know, they were actually really good partners in this. The head ward in there was actually a great partner and was open to it. And we were there every day, and I got a nickname. I was I was Claire with the good hair. Um they'd be like, the good hair.
SPEAKER_02And it's American, it's not the the perfectly adequate it was Claire with the good hair.
SPEAKER_01And they would so in LA County Men's jail, you'd park here outside, and the outdoor areas are on top of these two towers, the twin towers. And when I'd park, if they were outside on their time outside, they'd be like yelling down to me, Claire with the good hair, because it's bright blonde hair. But we were able to control it in in two months, which is like unheard of, because there's like 22,000 people. We got back in November, we had a measles outbreak in November, and end of December, beginning of January is COVID.
SPEAKER_02The challenge that you brought up about local public health trying to do long-term planning and to fix things and how distractable the situation is where it's outbreak after outbreak. And when those outbreaks occur, the whole health department can be mobilized and everything gets put on hold again.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It's it's probably the biggest challenge because you hire for people with skill sets in peacetime, as we say, right? Like this is what your job is. But the reality is we had outbreaks consistently. All of the foodborne diseases and waterborne and people who work on data and trying to build systems, they'd be doing outbreaks and have to do their routine stuff and put out surveillance data, dashboards, and newsletters and interpret it and do the analysis. And so, yeah, who takes the time to be like, hey, we need to update this system? And, you know, there was always like a supergroup of people who understood informatics, but it's you know, it's funny because in public health I learned two things. I mean, I learned many things, but in local public health, I learned that the single two things that probably have an impact on how much you can do are contracting and your staff who you hire, because it's the government, and you have to be very smart about who you hire because you it is a hard job and people can be really passionate, but they're gonna need a variety of things. And so they're kind of like a lot of unicorns that you need to hire. You don't wanna hire people that aren't gonna be able to fit that because it's it's not like the private sector where if you know the job and the person don't meld, you can just, you know, move on. People are hired and they're there and they stay. I I think the average when I joined LA County, I think someone in HR told me like the average time that someone stays there is like 17 years, average. And I was shot. I was like, what? I changed shows for three years. And I actually ended up, I left, I burned down after two years of cover small and left right before my five years. And they're like, nobody does this.
SPEAKER_02Well, well, kind of the good news is if you build a DOS system, you need someone there for, you know, 20 years to maintain it. But once that person leaves, you're stuck. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01True. Yeah. I mean, and so many of the so another thing in public health is like so few people have the right skill sets. It does get stuck on one person or one small group, right? Like this group implemented this technology and they're the only ones who can run the system. And it's like the sunk cost, but it's actually like, well, we don't know what this system does. You know, there was millions of database, like you have to find all these private databases and stop that, right? Like everyone would spit up an access database back in those days and do whatever their own analytics, their own tracking, because they didn't like the one for the generalized software that they had. And and then that person would leave or be promoted or move. And there was no great institutional memory beyond the people. Everyone is so busy all the time, there wasn't time for memorializing and documenting it where there could be follow-on by the next generation.
SPEAKER_02And sometimes I think the processes for getting approval to do something can be pretty onerous. So you can start your own database, but if you were going to do this on the system and the network, there'd be probably months and maybe years of discussion.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02One of the remarkable things that I understand that you did was to partner with companies to bring advanced informatics to public health. Could you speak to how that started?
SPEAKER_01During that measles outbreak is when I got in contact with Uber and ended up working with them in public health. You're the regulator, and so you write the guidance and you have to enforce it. So there's lots of failed partnership models, but there's some positive ones as well. We had a measles case, and as you know, it's very time-sensitive to figure out everyone who's potentially exposed. And one of my teams was the contact tracing team. And, you know, they came to me and were like, we can't, we don't understand how to get in touch with anyone at Uber because it's all digital online, no one's responding. So sometimes I would like to go in a little hot in these situations, and I like fired off an email and just pulled email addresses I found from like senior leadership online and just laid into them, like, you know, we have legal authority, you have to do this within X amount of time. This is the these are the rules and regulations, and we can't get in touch with you, and you're potentially putting other people at risk. And to their credit, they emailed me back and were like, we're so sorry. This went in the wrong other algorithm. And they called me and they rectified and said this information. And then the week later, they're like, Hey, did you say that we're required to report and what does that look like? And we didn't know about this. Can you teach us? So they brought a bunch of people over to our very humble public health offices. And that's already unique. Private sector's not like, let me show up and learn more about what you do. And we had like a two or three-hour meeting and explained to them what reportable diseases requirements there were and why they would want to participate proactively and build something. And they said, Well, maybe we should build a portal specifically. We have a law enforcement one for emergency situations, but maybe we should do it for this and might be a great idea. And so, you know, I couldn't build it. I was working in government, so I was like, hire someone. And then the next week COVID starts, they're like, hey, what's this novel coronavirus? And you know, January. And I was like, yeah, it's gonna be huge. So anyway, I started consulting for them on the side. I got ethical approval and two hours a week at 5 a.m. was the only time I had. And they built out this huge portal which exists today, and you can put in your request for any contact tracing for any diseases, and they'll send you back the information very immediately.
SPEAKER_02And they you being the public public health authorities.
SPEAKER_01Yes, to the authority. Uh, if you're a public health agency and credentialed, then you've had an exposure and you they'll send you the information. They do a bunch of other pro public health things that I was really proud of. And I had a moment where I realized, and and through that, I met all these other companies that were like, well, what can we do? What can we do? When they started sending out pro public health messages about COVID and masking, like In April, we're requiring masks and all these things. I, you know, I got a little choked up because I thought, God, I in public health, I would bang my head on a wall for another year before I feel like I could have gotten these messages out. There's so many different avenues to get this information out that we need people to, you know, protect themselves and protect others. And how do they do that and teach them about things so they can make decisions for themselves and their families? And in public health, we kind of aren't great at that. And so I really enjoyed working with the private sector. And I, I mean, my main job was first head of data. And then as soon as we knew a vaccine was coming, I was the director of vaccine preventable diseases as well. And so I ran the vaccine distribution for LA County for COVID. I had had two years of not seeing my family much and sleeping. So I I left, but I was, you know, I think that experience really led me to think, what are some new novel approaches to have a public health impact?
SPEAKER_02You were able to do this with Uber because you were the public health department. To me, the message is you can convene people and and you were able to leverage that position as a public health authority to partner with someone who could innovate and do things more rapidly than you could in public health.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And, you know, and get different people on board and come from a different messenger. Because, you know, after a while they didn't want to hear it from us. So if if we could have all these different messengers having the same message. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02After this, you recognized some of the that you could innovate more rapidly and quickly. And but you did take one more government position, and that was at ARPA H. And how did you find that? Did they have a little more flexibility?
SPEAKER_01I made some contacts and friends, and some people had gone to ARPA H and so that got me interested in it. I met a program manager there. He was doing really interesting work in population health. And it was a program called Heroes, and it was of outcomes-based financing for population health. That's like high-risk, high reward investments. It was really cool because you got to talk to the private sector and public sector and philanthropy and actually try to solve the problem. And we had these contracting authorities to allow us to be more flexible and milestone-based. And it was just a whole new world of government and that was based on DARPA, specifically for health.
SPEAKER_02DARPA being the acronym for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, famous for avoiding some of the typical bureaucratic problems that come with government agencies. So having rapid development, flat organizational structure, and small, nimble units to innovate. ARPA H is the health version trying to rapidly innovate in healthcare.
SPEAKER_01We basically created the largest ever outcome-based financing for health program. We were going to de-risk the initial investment. The people who decided to apply had to leverage their $15 million to have a two-to-one match from the private sector of philanthropy. It was just looking at outcomes over three years. There had been, before I arrived, kind of some high-level meetings on some of the key indicators for health at a population level that we needed to impact. What came from that was opioid overdose, maternal mortality, and ASCBD risk. The idea was that these groups of states or health departments and medical providers and philanthropy, whoever you wanted, startups would get together and apply to one of the outcomes. This is a very different way to invest in public health. It's really looking specifically at outcomes and you meet them over three years. It was really exciting. And we we were really figuring out what kind of novel financing models could work and who would be the partners to implement and who would be the partners to support. I found that that key to having these conversations was really the government's willingness to put skin in the game and de-risk that first $15 million. So if they're putting their money in, they blow through our money first. So the government money pays out for these outcomes as they make progress. If they're doing well, you know, make it through our money and then they get to the private sector funds raised. We were like, we don't know the interventions that are going to work in your area with your population. So that's you. You get the group together that's going to do it, apply, tell us evidence-based interventions that are likely going to work and what you want to do. And then we competed it, awarded it. And so I think we negotiated 16 to 18 contracts. And unfortunately, at the end of last year, it was cut right when it was about to start. But Heroes was a pretty amazing time because it was all about innovation and there's a new another way to do this. And we've seen it in other sectors. They've done outcomes-based financing in other sectors. So it was really saying, here are the lessons learned. How do we apply that to population health? Which is a really hard and challenging problem. But yeah, unfortunately, it was cut. So a lot of the good work you do sometimes can not make a lot of people.
SPEAKER_02Some of the things went a little over my head. You talked about de-risk, that that this de-risks it. And the risk would be you're funding something that doesn't work. So it's like a futility analysis where if it's not working, that's it. The money stops. Is that what you meant by de-risk?
SPEAKER_01Well, de-risk from two perspectives, I guess. De-risk was that our money was going to be used first. If the awardee was not successful, they weren't going to be reimbursed because they weren't making headway on their outcome. And so they had to make X percent every, you know, three months, six month check-in. And if they weren't making that, we weren't going to get paid. And so if they didn't make it through our first 15 million, the money that they had raised that was going to be the secondary pot, there was no risk that they were actually going to have to pay out, right? But if they were doing great work, which is what we wanted to incentivize, they would go through our 15 million really quickly. And then the the other people who had contributed and and signed agreements would then have to be paying out for those outcomes. But they lived or worked, they were an employer in the community, they were a university, they had some connection. So if that outcome's getting better, they're getting different kinds of benefits from that. It was a monetary der. But I think also conceptually and to make it easier for people to commit to that, because if you're making momentum and progress, everyone wants to jump on the winning, the winning train, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, those other entities. Their money, they were doing this to see the benefit. Interesting. So you're now back in the private sector. I am. I assume that you're still working public health in your consulting role. Yeah. But what is it that you're working on? What excites you about the future?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I kind of feel like I always am doing public health on the side, like an unpaid job, but just when you're in it and you love it and you work with people and you get calls and they ask you to do things, you say yes. Because as public health lifers know, there's never enough money. And it's kind of a, I like to say like it's like a bat phone. Your WhatsApp's full of all of your colleagues, and everyone kind of leans on each other. But when Heroes was cut, I was, you know, ready to to try something new. And I'd never done this side of the house. And I would always been on the client side. I'm new, I've only been here a couple months. The first shock to me was that I was going to a conference and someone was like, Oh, do you need, you know, a budget to like do things? And I'm like, What? In the public sector, we don't have that. But it's great because it brings in the pieces from the private sector that I really have enjoyed working both within but on the other side too. But seeing it from afar, which is really the ability to innovate, say yes, having resources to try things and fail, or try things and hopefully succeed, but really iterate on that and be responsive to kind of the needs for colleagues still in the government and trying to do things better and really leverage where we are in this moment with AI and technology, not just AI, right? Blockchain and cryptography. I hope that we can do that great leap that we did, you know, in so many cool things in Africa where there was just no sunk costs and we're so behind in so many places in public health that maybe we can just see this moment as opportunity. Public health's having a crisis moment, a crisis across the board with information, with funding, with how it's structured. And I'm very optimistic that if we learn our hard lessons, which I think public health has learned a lot or had to, we can really leverage this moment with AI to do a lot of great stuff and make ourselves go further. I'm not, you know, it's not the silver bullet, but I think it'll help a lot with a lot of the things that public health routinely does.
SPEAKER_02I do want to read a quote to you. Equitable public health solutions targeting underserved communities are unlikely to come from the same inequitable healthcare infrastructure that initially created them. Can the same thing be said about technology? How do we build technologic solutions that don't increase the inequitable systems? It's a very tough question.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02By the way, that quote is yours. I want to let people know.
SPEAKER_01You knew that, but I wrote it in my goodbye email uh to LA County, reflecting on what we accomplished, which was amazing. I think the key, well, I don't know what technology, but for public health, the key was that I I tried to know what I don't know, right? So I I leaned into people who knew things I didn't know and were connected to communities I was not connected to or I knew existed, but I didn't know things about, and get feedback data that we could incorporate. And I think one of the early things with the startup I was working on is I was so worried that, you know, AI was so biased in how the LLMs were trained. Because just in my brain for public health, you know, 90% of the amazing things that we worked on and did in Lessons Learned were never published. It's all word of mouth. And public health is very much a kind of oral history in all of the peer review and stuff, it's always a bias of success, right? So, you know, there's just so much missing. And so when you train models on incomplete data sets or with the absence of the negative or the lessons learned, they're not going to be super effective for all situations. I worry about that. And I think, so, you know, one idea I had, I don't know, and like I floated to the CDC in like 2023 was like everyone who was retiring coming out of COVID, who are these great state and local health leaders, public health leaders, and just, you know, COVID did it, did them in, and they're ending their careers and been doing it for so long. Their institutional knowledge and just everything that they had learned was not documented. Why can't we just pay them for a year to be a fellow and literally just download their brains and however they want to, so we can train these models on them and we don't lose that. That's so important. Those pieces of data that are not just numbers but context. Oh, this only happened because in public health we hear that all the time. We build these systems and we think they're going to catch everything, but really often outliers end up having huge impact. But it only happened because this one person noticed this, or this really astute doctor did this, or this Epi asked this question. How do we download those bits of data, the contextual data that I think is so important when you speak about the equitable piece? We're very good at having the technology to do it, but using it across all different populations with different lived experiences and different languages, that's not happening. And so, how do you really capture that? Is the question. And it's, I guess I call it responsible curiosity. Is how do you ask the right questions and try new things, but in a responsible, ethical way where you know that this is not to just see if it works and you can make something do it, but uh if you can better inform this tech that's kind of taking over our lives.
SPEAKER_02I just hear over and over again getting in the field and understanding people and sometimes these technological solutions are not necessarily tested on a diverse population. My final question: if you could choose one item to put in your public health backpack, literal or figurative, what would it be?
SPEAKER_01I think it would be, can I say two that are connected?
SPEAKER_02Yes. I think most people want two.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Humility and listening. I think like real discipline listening to communities. Data and models are so important and they matter, but public health specifically kind of succeeds or fails based on whether we truly understand people's lived experiences. Listening really keeps you grounded and focus on the impact of those instead of making assumptions, which I think is crucial for public health, but also as an underlying principle, I would say, for AI, responsible AI.
SPEAKER_02Maybe the listening will be done by a machine. A very apathetic machine.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I hope we can get better at teaching empathy.
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SPEAKER_00Inspired to Heal podcasts are for informational purposes only and should not be considered as health or professional advice. You're not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of the host or the guest's current or past employers.
