May 21 - Introductions and Exposure Notification Discussion

Owned by Brad Peters
Last updated: May 30, 2020
6 min read

Agenda

Let’s take a roll call

  • Kyle called out partner locations he recognized. We’ll cover all when we “go around the table”

  • PathCheck folks on this call: Kyle, (head of product), Christian (product generalist), Sherif (product/tech for Safe Places), DC (customer success ?), Sam (CTO), Ranna (PM extraordinaire)

We still start with introducing the meeting series and the intention behind it, what we hope to accomplish, etc - 10 minutes

  • Each jurisdiction has unique needs, and we also anticipate tremendous overlap.

  • What we’re doing, not doing, think we should be doing, crazy ideas

  • Learn from each other, define a more cohesive approach, provide scaffolding for future partners


We will go around the table - Group (country,state, partner) by group and ask for brief intros and a spokesperson for the group to answer the following in freeform:

  1. Introduce your team (and who is on the call)

  2. What do you hope to get (meta) out of this Tech Alliance and working with other groups trying to solve similar tech problems?

  3. What are the most pressing topics we should discuss in the future that you most hope to hear from others and what their perspectives are?

Guam

  • Vince Munoz lead tech contact with PathCheck + Frank Lujan (CTO)

  • a US territory out in the Pacific

  • very interested in what we consider the underserved part of the community (without cellular devices), trying to incorporate federal grant applications, superapp application for tourism, looking at one for schools, one for community. Wrap other community info/resource needs into a combined app with

Kansas City

  • Aaron Deacon (Civictech nonprofit, KC DigitalDrive, Code for KC, a Code for America affiliate), KC captain also on call (Paul), with a public-private partnership, explaining why we think there is value in this project, explain tradeoffs, help public health people navigate the tricky landscape and the policy and political crosswinds. Half population in Kansas, half in Missouri, which also complicates getting jurisdictional buy-in. None of that is directly about the tech. Positioning this not as a contact-tracing tech but as a piece of technology that can support contact tracing as part of its value. Just helping manual contract tracers be more efficient and accurate is a win (paraphrase).

  • Paul Barham - interested in keeping up with the Safe Places codebase as well

  • Have a team from the IT staff at the Univ of Kansas’s health system. Chris Gessler (sp?) et al. (not on call), IT consulting to health authorities willing to install the software.

Puerto Rico

  • Tomas Moran - Puerto Rico project (but actually live in KC), planning to roll out live as close to June 1 as possible. Has taken quite a bit of herding cats, as you can imagine. All of the above points are real for us, including that the understanding of the technology is really poor even among those you’d expect to have a better grasp of it (epidemiologists' assumptions about efficacy of bluetooth). Engineer by training with 30-40 years of healthcare experience. (Director of quality at Stanford and Palo Alto medical foundation!)

  • Assistance with the interview process of contact tracers, CRM like, DiMaggi (sp?) open source tool, another open source project less sophisticated. Has roles, one such is “case investigator” can determine who merits an investigation and creates a case. Looking for how they can use such a tool as Safe Places.

  • Important to get Safe Paths translated into Spanish. Have lawyers lined up. Met with big industry group. Setting up contact-tracing center to act as the “grunts” to do the minutiae.

  • Re BT vs GPS, definitely going with GPS, have consensus. Parallel app from MIT, some pushing for hybrid tool (constraint of can’t use GAEN). Employers want to learn how to plug in.

  • Investigating people without devices issue. Have met with hardware companies in silicon valley to make a hardware device that doesn’t require a cellphone, once we’ve settled on the protocol.

  • Perceived problems with minutes (dollars from federal government might help but perception also needs to be managed).

  • Counterpart Peter Broadwell invited me to this thing. Long-time friend and collaborator. He is my eyes and ears in the land of safe places.

  • I was a programmer one day, way in the past.

  • How do we connect the person whose phone rings with the right contact tracer? Have some theories. Need to connect them to the correct investigator, not a random one. What info can they give us? Send the trail and do the intersection? Step is so delicate… Too many hoops for a person who is nervous. Especially in a demo project. Maybe we send a unique code?

  • Peter, Pedro, George have all been contributing and participating

  • Peter works with this team, has a deep tech history. Aware that this needs to be part of a larger ecosystem that needs nice clean interfaces across the unified experiences.

Hawaii

  • Kevin Vaccarello - great to hear others

  • share political and business concerns mentioned above

  • Part of a coalition of NGOs, community members, for-profit leaders. Grassroots, apolitical fashion to address political and policy leaders. Native Hawaiian nonprofit. Indigenous population base, more at risk for COVID, have been keeping an eye of Safe Paths / Safe Places, want to make sure experiences is localized and customized for local sensibilities but looking for the 80/20 benefit from shared concerns

  • Key issues: tourist-based economy, esp. getting crushed. Will feel a ripple effect for a long time to come. Looking at the Safe Places / Paths component as part of a growing suite of services needed to safely open the economy for tourism, and a transparent way for businesses to make customers trust and feel safe, starting with essential businesses, farmers, restauranteurs (sp?), food supply chain (currently dependent on airlifts/boatlifts for food and fuel).

  • Trying to integrate the indigenous epistemology with contemporary science and technology, revisit self sufficiency models that did exist and satisfy earlier (smaller) population, while carefully leveraging benefits of tech.

  • Charles Koehl and Melanie Plaza also on call from this team.

  • Charlie = CTO of Sustain Hawaii. Have been working with Kevin on another, health/nutrition related project. Fixes for chronic health conditions. Focused on this for now, on the learning curve.

  • Melanie working on the solutions for Hawaii, help Kevin and Charles with this extra push. Interested in which things we’re developing make sense to integrate back into the larger open source platform.

Dominican Republic

  • Ismael Cedano - a few months ago we released a COVID (need to get exact name) application, with information about current cases, infections, recovery. Maps of clinics near the user. COVID Link? hybrid applicaion with COVID safe paths and the existing application. Interviews/tracing with users who might be positive. Moving off app to a symptoms-report form. Trace those users are infected and help other people to know where they’re moving. Try to integrate safe places to create a map of all the devices that are navigating around the country.

  • Close to the first release. Want to release as soon as possible, for the economy.

Juicy Topic

  • What do folks think about exposure notifications?

  • Tomas: We’re running a contact tracing org with three investigators at top and tracers below. Anyone with the app will be routed to one of those three. We’ll provide them with a technology support partner, to make sure the trail gets to the investigator. Consult with epidemiologist to decide what part of the trail is worth experimenting in the initial pilot. Don’t want to overwhelm the center. Good test example might be beauty salon or small cafe. Would expect to find a small number of people, and can measure and learn from the volume of response.

  • Kyle: Sounds like a cautious learn and measure approach.

  • Tomas: Yes we’ll use the tool to supplement but be very careful about the extent to which we use it before we understand the impact and support burden, etc. Would use same process to bring a BT solution into the process.

  • Vince: Real advantage is to contact people in the asymptomatic phase. I think people should only test if they have some symptoms. We have trouble with BT, if you haven’t been tracking your proximity exposures you’ll never be able to notify anybody which is a compelling reason why we think GPS will work better for us. Hybrid would be nice, beacons can be part of the shopping solution. From a tourism perspective we think enforced contact tracing (along with certified testing at both ends) is part of making other countries feel like Guam is a safe destination.

  • Kyle: We plan to expose the levers to fine-tune the variables (location, duration, probability thresholds) so that adopters can experiment

  • Aaron: We’ve shied away from touting the exposure notification aspect until we have learned more and developed more of a sense of trust. Epidemiologist: how do we decide what’s important (church choir for an hour vs. grocery store 20 minutes). For sure interesting, feels “Wild west” though. Get the data set right before we worry about exposure notifications.

  • Sherif: Other side of the story: opening economy, work/schools, where GPS doesn’t work as well, BT and wifi may be more appropriate in certain scenarios and use cases. Egypt more interested in the exposure notifications than the contact tracing.

Next steps

Closing thoughts / housekeeping on the meeting time, etc.

  • We plan to do this again next week, try to accommodate EU/African time zones