1176: Preparing for the Next Global Health Event

JOHN SHEEHAN: 

This is Public Health Review Morning Edition for Thursday, July 30, 2026. I'm John Sheehan with news from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

 

Major international events put extraordinary pressure on public health systems, making preparation, real-time surveillance, and cross-agency coordination more important than ever. Today, Eric Whitworth, CEO of InductiveHealth Informatics, a member of ASTHO's 2026 Innovation Advisory Council, talks about how public health agencies used syndromic surveillance, dashboards, and data integration to monitor health threats during the FIFA World Cup, and what those efforts reveal about preparing for future events like the Super Bowl in the 2028 Olympics. Eric Whitworth, welcome to the show.

 

ERIC WHITWORTH: 

Thank you so much.

 

SHEEHAN: 

So, Eric, InductiveHealth partnered with several jurisdictions during the World Cup. Can you walk us through how your team prepped, how it went logistically, and what you learned?

 

WHITWORTH: 

Yeah, it was a lift, certainly, and a lot of preparation across a lot of jurisdictions. Our syndromic surveillance tool, we partner with Johns Hopkins University to deliver S.S. to a lot of local jurisdictions, and that's one of the main tools that these jurisdictions use to help monitor conditions and in public health events during the World Cup, they kind of, most jurisdictions divided this into three phases, and we kind of helped in different ways in those three phases. There was the pre-event preparedness, what are the potential risks, and prioritizing them so they knew what to look for, making sure they had the right systems in place. So, did they have wastewater tracking? Did they have the right syndromic tool? Did they have the right overlap and collaboration with disease surveillance technologies they may use, and then trying to figure out what those gaps were, and then figuring out how to share data? You know, kind of the pre-event. And during the event itself, once the World Cup started, you had what was just the daily timely tracking of health data, you know, to decision makers to figure out what's happening and what they should do about it. So, it's organizing that data, which we help with in a variety of ways with analytics and reporting and dashboards, and then monitoring those prioritized conditions within the different, you know, county and jurisdictional borders. and now that the World Cup is ended, is kind of post event monitoring. You know, those things aren't gone now. So, it's monitoring them to assess you know lingering or emerging impacts after the fact, doing kind of a comprehensive after action review, and then figuring out what to do better next time. You know there's going to be the Super Bowl, there's going to be the Winter Olympics, there's always going to be the next kind of mass spreader big event. So, there's a variety of ways in which we kind of worked with side by side with these jurisdictions to prepare for, to execute, and then to kind of figure out what went right, what went wrong post World Cup.

 

SHEEHAN: 

Yeah, and so taking the World Cup as the example, what did this access to that real time data and those dashboards and the S.S. system you mentioned. How did that help guide decision makers?

 

WHITWORTH: 

Yeah, it was. It just it was the daily situational reporting which was key. You know, they knew what syndromes they wanted to prioritize going into the World Cup. You know, they had reviewed the syndrome definitions. They had set parameters. You know what? What were the parameters they need to use? The variables to figure out whether a syndrome was an impact. You had things: bioterrorism, vaccine preventable diseases, respiratory, gastrointestinal, gastrointestinal, sorry, noncommunicable crash injuries, you know, firework related injuries, and so all those had to be kind of consolidated into how they wanted to route those, how they wanted to review them, what they wanted to do about them, and so you know you had kind of percentages and layers and qualifications they wanted to use to figure out what happened, and so during we were able to route that data very quickly between departments, we're able to create the surveillance pipelines and sit and sit beside, you know, reportable disease technology and wastewater scanning and other areas to kind of route those data sets together, make decisions fastly, you know, fast triage incoming alerts with the incident notifications and get email and text out quickly, interpret the documents that came in, communicate and elevate as needed to different areas, and then provide kind of these daily incident reporting logs that you could quickly monitor and figure out what's happening. And it is even geography based, right, where things happen within 5, 10, 20, 250 miles of different locations, and so this was very individualized for Santa Clara versus Missouri versus Rhode Island, and these different areas that were doing this. So, a lot of individualization, a lot of dashboards, that came together in reporting functions to move this data and make decisions quickly.

 

SHEEHAN: 

Wow! And just as you described, sort of the number of variables, like that's a lot of data coming into these different pipelines.

 

WHITWORTH: 

No doubt. I mean, you're talking about thousands upon thousands of, or more than that, tens of thousands of messages daily that are coming in that need to be kind of quantified, divided out, and figure out what's happening. You have to compare or apply algorithms and different variables to each one to figure out the impact, what it is, route it to the right area, figure out if it needs to be overlaid with different data sets and compared to historical information to figure out, you know, is this in line with what we've seen before or is it not within you know their jurisdiction. So it was moving fast and it went really well. Jurisdictions, you know, we'll talk about lessons learned later, but it just the preparing early for this was the key for everyone.

 

SHEEHAN: 

Yeah, and so as we look ahead to something like the Olympics in 2028, what are you what are you going to carry forward from this experience that will help inform that?

 

WHITWORTH: 

Yeah, it is. You can't prepare early enough, because you know as public health technology just is right. It's many years behind more commercialized industries, and so it has not been historically easy to aggregate and integrate data sets and systems together to share data, even within public health teams within the same department. And so, to set this up, where you have, you want to add more conditions for monitoring, right? You want to share information between teams. You want to create consolidated workflows to and bring people together that maybe don't work together on a daily basis. So, preparing early and figuring that out was the key to everything, and that's going to be kind of the key going forward, and it's also going to be continuing to kind of modernize technology, use APIs rather than you know batch process type imports, be able to link systems together real time now rather than just you know when a mass spreader event or an event like this happens. So it's the communication and the alerts and the workflows was key to everything, and then we figured out that expanding general syndromic surveillance training across public health departments is key because it ends up being a kind of a little bit of a siloed team, and their impact is massive, but it's not maybe as well-known as immunization or disease surveillance, more reportable diseases, and so I think people now coming out of the World Cup have seen the impact and the importance of not just syndromic technology, but syndromic data generally, and what it can do, what it can tell you. So, I think keeping that momentum, having departments use that data more, integrate it more with data sets now, rather than just when these big events happen, would have a big impact across these public health departments.

 

SHEEHAN: 

Sure, and you touched on this, that layer of algorithmic data analysis. You know, you're applying some AI tools there. What was that process like of using those AI tools?

 

WHITWORTH: 

Yeah, AI wasn't a massive part of the World Cup response. It should be part of the next one, and we've learned that because public health departments are underfunded, and funding is going to be always the number one question, the number one concern for both state and local public health departments and their ability to do what we did. There's a lot of manual effort, right? A lot of meetings, a lot of configuration, a lot of manual intervention daily to review this data, and into the future, I don't see I don't see any other choice but to find a way to use more automated tools, AI functionality to deduplicate this data, monitor it, analyze it, move it, you know, consolidate these workflows and get things done faster. A lot of questions around the best way to do that, but it's you know the number of these events that are happening and the way technology is moving. Public health departments to keep up are going to have to look to strategies. AI being one of the prime ones to be able to move fast enough to keep up.

 

SHEEHAN: 

Sure, and be able to sift through all that data. You can't, you know, you can't do it without it.

 

WHITWORTH: 

No, not at all. There's just too much, and there's more coming in. You know, what we are constantly jurisdictions are onboarding more facilities. There's more tests. There's more test results, susceptibilities. There's new threats happening. There will be another threat. It may not be on the level of COVID, but something in the next few years will happen. Several things have happened since then, and it changes too fast for just headcount within public health offices to keep up with the amount of responsibility they have, and so the ability to scale systems with automation without manual intervention, without custom development, and to have AI look at this data and tell you when something's happening, when something may be happening, give you better suggestions on on how to use it, and not and not to be very clear, you know, not replace the people that are in the department, but free them up, free up EPIs and public health experts to actually do the job they're meant to do, rather than some of the administrative stuff is going to be key to being able to scale.

 

SHEEHAN: 

Absolutely. And how would you how would you advise jurisdictions as they wade into that new territory, especially around concerns with you know data privacy and security?

 

WHITWORTH: 

You've got to get with your IT departments at the state and local levels have big opinions on this. They going slow and steady is the right answer. This is the most confidential and proprietary of data. Data is ultimately owned by the person, and we're you know both myself as a public health vendor and public health departments are stewards of that data, and we have an obligation to protect it. Now, that doesn't mean we can't find ways for that data to be used with AI in a safe way. AI can't learn from the data; the data has to be hosted in private and secure cloud environments. Models have to be understood, and IT departments need to be engaged early to figure out what tools are acceptable and what's not. But there's also going to have to be a shifting of mindset here a little bit that we're going to have to take some chances because AI is saving people time and money and helping people get back to the jobs they want to do in a lot of different industries and they can do that in public health too and with the level of funding the levels of funding that are happening right now the decrease in levels of funding I should say you know this is this is a must and so there's a safe way to do it. But I think there's going to have to be a push, and it's going to have to be public health departments working with IT early to make sure they understand what they can and can't do, and then pushing for some of this without fear of you know it's not about losing headcount; it's about freeing up the public health experts to do what they need to do.

 

SHEEHAN: 

Yeah, and let's talk about that attention a little bit because there's sort of an irony there of you mentioned this decrease in funding, and you know tools like these AI tools meant to free up workforce. You know you can't roll those out without some kind of funding up front. How does inductive health, you know, help jurisdictions with those funding challenges?

 

WHITWORTH: 

Yeah, it's a key to this is picking the right areas to invest in AI. Right, AI doesn't belong everywhere all at once. In public health in general, there's got to be some specific, nuanced use cases where we know it can help. Data ingestion, right? There's so much of it. Public health data is muddy on a good day, and so you got to pick these areas that are high manual intervention that are that are difficult manual task, right? We want public health experts talking to patients. We want them giving the final say on things. We want them analyzing the data at the end. But a lot of these workflows and initial communications and data consolidation and error reporting and even communication back and forth with providers on what's going well, what's going wrong with the with the sharing of data, you know, with HL7 and Firebase protocols and however it's being shared, we got to pick the areas that make the most impact for the public health department, and when you do that, you can make a use case that a lot of dollars are being saved. So that the ability to put some dollars in up front and invest in an AI workflow or an AI tool makes all the sense in the world when you can show on the on the other side of it. Right, you're getting X percentage return on it, 3, 4, 5, 10x return on the time and dollars you're saving in the end. So it's about the use case you can make. It just has to be focused because when you say we're going to use AI everywhere, that's not the answer. It's want to focus on the initial data aggregation, deduplication, cleaning of data, kicking off of workflows, communication with providers. You know things that take a lot of manual time that we want to take off public health experts' hands, so they can focus on communities.

 

SHEEHAN: 

Absolutely, Eric Whitworth. Thanks so much.

 

WHITWORTH: 

Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

 

SHEEHAN: 

Eric Whitworth is CEO of InductiveHealth Informatics and member of ASTHO's 2026 Innovation Advisory Council, which connects private sector experts with state and territorial health leaders to advance public health innovation.

 

This has been Public Health Review Morning Edition. I'm John Sheehan for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.