MIT Solve

Solution & Team Overview

Solution name:

Democratizing Data for Pandemic Preparedness and Response

Short solution summary:

The UCSF team will use existing citizen and government data to assess the impact of policies on health and economic impacts. The aim is to understand what policies can minimize impacts among vulnerable populations.

In what city, town, or region is your solution team based?

San Francisco, CA, USA

Who is the Team Lead for your solution?

Mike Reid, MD. Assistant Professor. Mike works in the Center for Global Health Diplomacy, Delivery and Economics. He is involved with policy analyses, research, and agenda-setting activities related to pandemic response and data for program improvement.

Which Challenge Area does your solution most closely address?

Recover (Improve health & economic system resilience), such as: Best protective interventions, especially for vulnerable populations, Avoid/mitigate negative second-order consequences, Integrate true costs of pandemic risk into economic systems

What specific problem are you solving?

Disparities in COVID-19 infection and death across groups are well documented. There are, for example, profound disparities in different ethnic and racial groups across the US, with non-Hispanic Black persons and Hispanic or Latino persons being hospitalized at 4.7 and 4.6 times the rate of non-Hispanic White persons, respectively. The pandemic has, in short, been heavily felt by some segments of the general population but has been a mere annoyance for others. Such disparities have occurred even though they were well predicted by prominent researchers early in the pandemic. So, to minimize burden on vulnerable population in future pandemics, it is not necessary to predict what the vulnerable groups will be but, rather, to understand how we can better protect those groups in the future.

Who does your solution serve, and what needs of theirs does it address?

Our proposal fundamentally serves the affected populations: populations that are in many cases marginalized or underserved by health services and public health. These include, for example, immigrant populations or people living in crowded housing. Our solution also serves those who are responsible for making decisions that can have impact on such populations. These include local, state, and federal health officials; elected leaders; and community organizations that work closely with such populations. Our solution will provide these stakeholders with examples from the COVID-19 of what worked or didn’t work to minimize burdens on disparities. These lessons will be well documented in publications, white papers, presentations, and online resources. Likewise, we will thoroughly document our analytic framework such that further examples can be added to the toolkit of policies.

What is your solution’s stage of development?

Proof of Concept: A venture or organisation building and testing its prototype, research, product, service, or business/policy model, and has built preliminary evidence or data

More About Your Solution

Please select all the technologies currently used in your solution:

Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
Behavioral Technology
Big Data
Crowd Sourced Service / Social Networks
GIS and Geospatial Technology
Imaging and Sensor Technology
Internet of Things
Software and Mobile Applications

What “public good” does your solution provide?

The COVID-19 pandemic has also shown the hunger for relevant and organized data. Not only scientists, but also journalists and members of the general public started to look for tables and graphs that inform them on the situation in their close neighborhood and worldwide, to gain a better understanding of events.

Such democratization of data should, in principle, lead to more equitable outcomes and solutions. And yet, that has not necessarily proven to be true, as evidenced by the large disparities documented in this pandemic.

A missing piece is our analytic framework for understanding how policies have or have not yielded changes. In other words, the data can only lead to democratization if we use them to assess decisions and see how they affect our populations.

How will your solution create tangible impact, and for whom?

The solution will have a tangible impact for vulnerable populations who have felt the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our solution will provide a toolkit of policy decisions and behaviors for minimizing continued burdens in this pandemic and in future pandemics.

How will you scale your impact over the next one year and the next three years?

We will focus on San Francisco and California due to existing ties. Lessons from California will in many be cases relevant to other geographies. Moreover, the analytic methods and data examples can be extended across the nation and abroad, especially as partnerships are developed.

How are you measuring success against your impact goals?

Partnerships are key to our prior and ongoing work, and will be key to this proposal. This includes partnerships with communities; partnerships with local, state, and federal agencies; and partnerships with community organizations.

To us, these partnerships very much provide a measure of success: how useful is our information to our partners? Are our solutions guiding policy and other decisions?

In which countries do you currently operate?

United States

In which countries do you plan to deploy your solution within the next 3 years?

Botswana
Kenya
Uganda

What barriers currently exist for you to accomplish your goals in the next year and the next 3 years? How do you plan to overcome these barriers?

UCSF currently has some projects and data streams that are siloed. There are also data sources, mentioned above, such as data scraping of online social platforms, that have not been utilized. We also currently lack the resources to analyze various policies across various geographies and subpopulations, using the many data sources we have in hand and will assemble. The funding provided by this grant could be instrumental in allowing us to bring data together and thoroughly use them to conduct policy analysis.

More About Your Team

Partnership & Growth Opportunities