510: Harm Reduction Partnerships, AI in PH Comms

ROBERT JOHNSON: 

This is the award-winning Public Health Review Morning Edition for Monday, September 25, 2023. I'm Robert Johnson. Now, today's news from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

BRANDON DEL POZO 

Unfortunately, it's fair to say over the last several decades that public safety, public health, harm reduction, even fire, EMS, and police have evolved in silos.

JOHNSON: 

Brandon Del Pozo is a former New York City police officer who now studies public health at Brown University.

DEL POZO 

In the field, police, EMS, fire, harm reduction, they're dealing with the same populations, going into the same scenes, dealing with the same people in need. And we need the people at the executive levels to understand that, and frankly, to act accordingly to meet and discuss and plan and strategize and compromise in the same ways that their workers do out in the field.

JOHNSON: 

And Del Pozo, who also was chief of police in Burlington, Vermont, says most officers know that something needs to change.

DEL POZO 

I've talked to countless officers who say this, and I always feel like I'm two steps behind. I feel like what I'm doing is futile. It's not working, but it's what I'm being told to do.

JOHNSON: 

The answer, according to Del Pozo, is to follow those who've made an impact by following overdose science.

DEL POZO 

It's always been collaborative, it's always been by breaking down silos. And when you follow the evidence, the evidence is going to tell you, you need fire, police, EMS, harm reduction, public health and medical system, schools, community groups to work together, right?  That's not just ideology. That's what the evidence tells you about what works.

JOHNSON: 

ASTHO examines the need for better partnerships between public health, public safety, and harm reduction in a new episode of the Public Health Review podcast. It's available now, everywhere you stream audio.

Public health communicators are weighing the impact of AI on their work, managing and sharing agency messages. Antony Cousins is executive director of AI strategy with Cision, a company that develops technology for communicators. We met him at a recent conference held in Atlanta. Here's what he had to say about the future of AI.

Catching up with Antony Cousins at the Conference in Atlanta, talking about AI and the benefits, also maybe the risks of having AI do a lot of our communications work. Give us an update right now, for people who aren't following this, they see a lot about it. Where are we as it relates to the application of artificial intelligence in the communication space?

ANTONY COUSINS: 

So, we are in some ways, in the really early days, because of the release of new technologies, the large language models and generative AI, those are kind of relatively new capabilities. But of course, we've all been using AI and communications for many years, right. Over a decade ago, sentiment analysis was released. So summarization and other technologies have been out for a while. But the new capabilities, the ability for AI to generate pretty good quality text, and also imagery and nail video. That's like brand new. So I think where we are in the industry is for the new technologies, we're still figuring out how to implement that in products and make that work for the part of the workflow, the standard workflow of communicators. So it's still really early days actually for that.

JOHNSON: 

But you are working on some models, you told me before we did this interview about a campaign to sell a car. Talk us through how that's working, what what that's like.

COUSINS: 

Yeah, so, that's kind of the direction of travel right is AI is now capable. I think the real value of the large language models is that they're not just capable of doing the same kind of analysis we've been doing but a bit faster and a bit better. The really interesting capabilities of the large language models is they understand communications principles, they understand communications best practice, because they've consumed enough content on that to be pretty good at that. So I think the direction of travel and where we're heading is, in the case of a car campaign, you can ask AI right now, to give you some pretty decent smart communication level KPIs to achieve really good business outcomes and to make the connection between the two. And it actually does a pretty good job of that. I think that's something that as communicators, we often get caught up in just getting stuff out there. And we sometimes figure out what the measurements are after the campaign, right? That happens to all of us. But the power of AI right now it actually does a pretty good job of joining that out to business outcomes. It can also figure out how to communicate specific subjects to specific audience groups. It can create the content to deliver that messaging, it can plan the delivery of that in terms of times in terms of the channels, terms of specific outlets, and it can do in some cases, a more honest evaluation of performance than a human might do it in one performance. So across the spectrum of the communications workflow, generative AI has a role to play right now.

JOHNSON: 

Talk about the risk and reward of having a computer or an intelligent entity do that work of a communicator. What are the upsides? What are the downsides?

COUSINS: 

Yeah. So the upsides, obviously, is efficiency, right? We're gonna get much faster hitting some of those basic beats in a communications campaign or a crisis communications campaign than we are out right now. But the downside is, potentially, we're not going to be giving people as many opportunities to learn those lessons in a more manual way. Right? So I think we're heading that direction, we want to make sure that people are able to plan for crisis communications better than they do right now. And if you think if you're a communicator, without a specific crisis communications kind of office or team, you're not going to be giving crisis communications as much effort or attention as you should be. This is something that always gets a bit squeezed right in the priorities. So in this case, the real benefit AI can think through many different scenarios and plan for those scenarios, and provide you with that plan quicker than you could in humans. That's a real benefit, right? And a good example of efficiency where it can make us better. But the risk of that is, yeah, we're potentially not going to be training people or giving people the opportunity to learn how to lift themselves, which leaves you potentially in a weaker position overall, later on. So we need to work out how to implement these technologies whilst maintaining that dedication to training and growth and education as the new work was coming in.

JOHNSON: 

Also, today, Dr. Jennifer Thomas, with the Washington State Department of Health, spent much of this year developing and writing blog articles focused on wellness. There are eight articles in the series, covering everything from connecting with your community, to protecting yourself from harm. ASTHO now has a blog article celebrating that work, and you can read it by using the link in the show notes.

We'd also like to remind you to follow this newscast on your podcast player, and ASTHO on social media. We're on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

That'll do it for today. We're back tomorrow morning with more ASTHO news and information. I'm Robert Johnson. You're listening to the award-winning Public Health Review Morning Edition. Have a great day.