When Everything’s Connected: The Role of Data in Public Health

Transcript

This has been generated by AI and optimized by a human. 

Show ID [00:00:04]:

The power of data is undeniable. And unharnessed, it's nothing but chaos.

The amount of data was crazy. 

Can I trust it? 

You will waste money. 

Held together with duct tape. 

Doomed to failure.

This season, we're solving problems in real-time to reveal the art of the possible. Making data your ally, using it to lead with confidence and clarity, helping communities and people thrive. This is Data-Driven Leadership, a show by Resultant. 

Jess Carter [00:00:34]:

Public health isn't about hospitals, vaccines or disease prevention. It's woven into the fabric of our economy, our national security and our daily lives. In this episode of Data-Driven Leadership, we sit down with Dr. Heidi Steinecker, who's the senior director of our health and human services team at Resultant. We explore how economic trends, social policies and public health outcomes are deeply interconnected. As food costs rise, housing remains unaffordable for many and economic uncertainties persist, public health is often at the center of these challenges.

Jess Carter [00:01:04]:

Economic stability influences health outcomes in profound ways. When families can't access nutritious food or health care or live in a safe environment, the consequences ripple through communities. These stressors don't just affect individual well-being, they impact workforce productivity, strain health care systems, and even pose risks to national security. Heidi sheds light on these connections through the lens of One Health, a forward thinking approach that recognizes the link between human, animal, and environmental health. The perspective underscores how issues like climate change, food supply chains, and disease outbreaks require cross-sector collaboration and innovative policies. We also discussed the evolving role of data in shaping policies within HHS. From analyzing social determinants of health like housing, transportation, and education, to designing proactive public health interventions, data-driven insights are becoming essential tools for decision makers. By leveraging advanced analytics, policymakers can move beyond reactive solutions to creating long-term, sustainable strategies that improve public well-being.

Jess Carter [00:02:07]:

Join us for a thought provoking discussion on the future of health and human services, the policies shaping our communities, and how data can drive smarter, more effective solutions. Dr. Steinecker's expertise offers a unique look at how leaders can navigate these challenges to build a healthier, more resilient society. Let's get into it. 

Welcome back to Data-Driven Leadership. I'm your host, Jess Carter. Today we have Dr. Heidi Steinecker, senior director of our health and human services team here at Resultant.

Jess Carter [00:02:36]:

Let's get into it. Heidi, welcome.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:02:38]:

Thank you, Jess. Glad to be here today.

Jess Carter [00:02:41]:

Yeah, we're really glad to have you. I am super excited about our conversation because I think there's, I don't know, at least 16,000 directions it could take. Correct me if I'm wrong in any of this, but you've spent your career helping state agencies make data-driven decisions. One of the questions I might be curious about is what are some of the biggest challenges that you see in getting leaders to trust and use data effectively? Like, can you think of a time when you were like, oh, there's this huge concept around something that is just not based on data and how do I help leaders really lean on the data, not their assumptions or anecdotal evidence?

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:03:18]:

Yeah, no, happy to. So I do want to say, like my career really hasn't been all about states, but I think that a common theme, whether I was using data for community outreach in working with policy and operations with cancer, or whether it was working with a large health care system and seeing how they could be able to do better utilization of their, even their practice for access, or working with the Ministry of Health in Germany on how they were going to be able to try to infuse a huge population of Syrian refugees into their health care system. And then working with California State, and then of course working with multiple states and governments in consulting. How are you using data for visibility so that you can understand where you need to be able to put your emphasis on, what are the root causes, and then if you tackle those root causes right, then hopefully you're going to be able to leverage data to be able to get to where better outcomes are going to be?

Jess Carter [00:04:14]:

Yeah.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:04:14]:

So I would say that's the common thread. It's funny, I think a lot of people think that careers are supposed to be like this straight line. Mine has certainly been more like this. And so whenever I get asked to speak with like, different women's forums or leadership forums or mentoring emerging leaders, I always tell them, stop thinking that your career is this way. You should be collecting experiences along the way. I'm still surprised in the rooms I get to be in sometimes. And it's all because of some random experience that I collected years before that got me into where I was in that moment.

Jess Carter [00:04:48]:

That is so well said. That's amazing. And I think to your point, it makes sense, like we're set up to think I'm going to major in this thing in college and this thing that'll take me to this thing that'll take me to this. It looks like it's going to be really linear and it's just super not.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:05:03]:

I mean, you even look at my educational career. So technically, yeah, I'm an infectious disease doctor. Okay, so technically, epidemiologist, I can implement global health policy anywhere. However, I love to tell students my bachelor's degree was in English and history. Totally not even science related. Now, granted, I was a cell bio major for three years. And then of course, my senior year decided I don't want to be a doctor, so my husband, let's do something fun my senior year, right? You know, but. But again, like that background or that collected experience. Okay, fine. I had the cell bio background for three years and interned at the hospital and all of those things at the university I was at.

Jess Carter [00:05:46]:

Yeah.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:05:46]:

But that senior year of doing just history and English, policy, like that helped me later on to be able then do a master's in public policy and really understand, like, where does policy meet practice in public health setting.

Jess Carter [00:06:02]:

Okay, well, that's so cool. So you, you also just created the most effective and efficient summary of your career that I could have never asked you to do. So people probably now understand why I'm like, which direction do we take this? And so you and I haven't talked about this, I don't think. But I've been to like 26-ish countries. Ironically, I've been lots of places not Western Europe, so like Jordan, and worked with Iraqi refugees there, in Ukraine, and work with special needs. So there's all this stuff that is like in your travels I'm so intrigued by. And maybe that's even where when you say, sometimes I can't believe some of the rooms I get to be in. Is this correct that you just spent some time in D.C. with like, EU ambassadors, Department of State leaders, legislators from both sides, like, is that real?

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:06:43]:

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Jess Carter [00:06:44]:

Okay. Just a casual week for you.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:06:46]:

Just, you know, hanging out, having dinner with the, you know, Swiss ambassador in his residence with his team.

Jess Carter [00:06:52]:

That is insane to me. So, like, in those conversations, are you seeing data and analytics transforming public policy decisions? Is that part of what those conversations are?

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:07:04]:

100%, yes. Because you can't make good policy decisions or even thinking about strategy. I like to look at it as strategy. You can't even think of public policy or diplomacy. International diplomacy. It's a big chess game, right. And you can't know those different moves if you can't understand what data you have or visibility.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:07:23]:

I always like to equate data with visibility because when I'm trying to ask myself even a question of how do I solve for how many beds do I need to evacuate during a wildfire? If I don't have line of sight as to actual what's the acuity level, how many people I have to transfer? I mean, I might know their licensed bed, right? But I don't have like line of sight as to what is the actual ground zero issue going on, right? So when I think about it from a research perspective, it's mixed methods. It's. You need quantifiable data, but you need to be able to mix in some qualitative data of what's going on on ground zero. Whenever you're operating from a policy or immediate situation that you have to be about to solve for.

Jess Carter [00:08:07]:

That is amazing. And you've done that kind of work for a while. Would you say that you spend most of your time working on policies to plan for events and prevent events, or to respond to events once they've occurred?

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:08:25]:

I would say it's a little bit of both. I would say it depends on the year. Let's say January 2020. That was a lot of responding to an uncertain event, right? That was happening and collecting a variety of different data points to be able to determine what should be done next, right? At the time, I was the deputy director and the CMS state agency oversight director for the State of California, which oversees the largest health care system system in the U.S. And I would have to say that of course, we were using some variety of different types of data points to be able to determine when most states were looking at this in March, we had already set up on January 28th, the incident command structure.

Jess Carter [00:09:09]:

Wow.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:09:09]:

Because we were already doing the math behind the back of the math going, oh, times this potential R naught times 40 million people in our state. Ooh, times this R naught times this, right? And these are the amount that we have, right? So we were contingency planning really, really early on and prepping for that. So that would be an example of a response.

Jess Carter [00:09:29]:

Yeah.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:09:29]:

Some of the works that I'm doing right now, which a lot of my meetings in D.C. and working with different folks around the globe, is more now I would say preparatory, right? Of thinking of, okay, here's the different scenarios that can happen that can affect health and population health. I think of health, I also think of health as global security, national security, because health is absolutely a national security or global health security issue. So it just depends on the year, right? What are you focused on?

Jess Carter [00:10:03]:

So you have talked a bit about sort of both this high-level strategy and on-the-ground impact with something so substantial. How do you get from here's the strategy we agree on in a room in D.C. to here's the change that we're seeing on the ground in California, like when you, when you go to balance those things what does that look and feel like? I think there's a lot of people where that's happening behind the curtain and they're like, what is it actually like? I know that's really open ended, but I'm curious what you think.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:10:33]:

So first of all, I would say that decisions are iterative. They are constantly changing. So the phrase I like to tell people and the phrase that I live my life on is I'm constantly making decisions based on the information I have at the time. And it's a point in time of that information, right? And I can forecast, you can do predictive analytics, you can do different forecasting, you can kind of read the tea leaves by what you're seeing in other data points around the world. But you have to make a decision at the time that you have to make a decision. And then you iterate, and you're constantly iterating. And although that frustrates or sometimes confuses mass public, right? Because we're like, what's going on? How come it's constantly changing? Well, because the situation's constantly changing.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:11:17]:

And I think one thing that we can do better in health and human services is communicating the reason why we're constantly iterating and the new information and how that has to change in real time and we have to adjust. Just like we change what we wear every day based off of what the weather is, right? We look at the forecast and then we plan, right? So it's the same concept when we're looking at overall strategies, particularly when it comes to infectious disease or other types of things in the health and human services sphere.

Jess Carter [00:11:47]:

That makes a lot of sense. Well, and I'm going to throw a term out there and ask you entities that are so familiar with this and people who have no idea what I'm talking about. So social determinants of health. And I heard that there's like, there's kind of a new phrase, like it's evolving. And so one of the things I was going to ask you is, hey, if I'm a citizen just walking down the street in the United States or in a country, if I'm the director of an HHS entity in a state or the governor, like, could you pitch to me what does that mean and why should I think it's important?

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:12:17]:

Absolutely. So essentially, think of it this way. All these factors of where you live, what food you have access to, what health care access you have, what insurance you have, your type of employment, all of these things factor in to your likelihood of being healthy or unhealthy. Your access to water—fresh, clean water, right? Like air. All of these things have an effect on how much you're able to stay healthy or access treatment to become healthy as well as be able to have safety and quality of care. People think, oh, well, you have access to care.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:13:01]:

Access to care doesn't always mean that you're going to have safe, quality care, right?

Jess Carter [00:13:05]:

Okay. Part of me is like, if I'm the governor, I can't change the air. Why do I care if I'm a governor?

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:13:12]:

Well, because it's affecting your economy, it's affecting your population. And so what I like to tell people is, yes, it would be wonderful if people would think of health as far as, yes, it's great for us to be healthy, right? We all want livelihoods, we all want to be able to have families that live on for generations. But the reality of what a governor or a department of state or anything else are looking at, people run our economies, people run our systems. Without healthy people to show up to work, you no longer have an economy. And so it's really an economical driver when you get at these large systems or state or country issues. And we saw a little bit of that during the pandemic, right? We had things shut down or be really expensive because it hits your economy. I know the running joke now is the cost of eggs, right? Well, if you look at, we've had a massive food disruption because we had a disease hit our food chain, then obviously drives our costs up. But also think of all of the different farmers and livestock owners who have lost their entire life savings because of this.

Jess Carter [00:14:24]:

Yeah.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:14:24]:

And so it's economy, even at the state level and even national level, we've lost billions of dollars in the last year off of disease.

Jess Carter [00:14:32]:

It kind of reminds me of COVID. Like, I heard about it for several months before I felt it. But I was at a grocery store last night and you know, there's a sign up, you can only buy one carton a day per customer. And it's like most of them were gone. And it was like, wow, this is like not a story on the news anymore. It's. It's happening in my neighborhood. And so one of my curiosities is, you know, you've done a lot of work in this intersection of public health, economics, national security, and you've talked a little bit about this already. But what are some of the surprising connections or for other people, they might think they're surprising between industries and population, health or economy and the cost of food and public health outcomes? I mean, this is something that you could, I'm sure you could speak on as a TED talk or three.

Jess Carter [00:15:16]:

And so I'm curious, I'm curious what your know, what your real thoughts are about some of this.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:15:21]:

Yeah. So I mean, to liken it back to like 2020, right? Because people can understand this point. They've lived it. So in 2020, we had all of our health care data that sat here and our public health data that sat here.

Jess Carter [00:15:33]:

Yeah.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:15:34]:

And two lived in silos and didn't talk, right? And so the silver lining of the pandemic was that we started to realize, oh, no, we need to do data exchange between our health care system, our public health system, so that we have better visibility to be able to act and mitigate. Okay, so that's kind of joining all of our data points for human health.

Jess Carter [00:15:54]:

Right.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:15:55]:

But at that point, we didn't also add in what about environmental health when it comes to different kinds of waste or issues that are affecting the animals? We didn't also add in animal health or animal inspection data because that sits in Department of Agriculture or this data sits over here in Department of Fish and Wildlife. It sits in all these different, disparate silos in a state government and at the federal level, but they're not combined to where you can actually run an algorithm and a risk heat map to know where you have particular issues and then be able to drive mitigation quicker and faster. 

And so time is of the essence whenever you're trying to solve for infectious disease, because the quicker that you can mitigate an outbreak, whether it is in grasses that is affecting, you know, the types of clover that your animals eat, or whether it's in a human or whether it's in an animal, the time to task is key, because if you can mitigate that and intervene, you can cohort, you can test, you can treat so that you're not having to kill off entire livestock or culling multiple different, you know, poultry. And data gives you that access to be able to mitigate quick, quicker.

Jess Carter [00:17:10]:

There is this persona, I imagine very much exists in the world who bops around and doesn't think deeply about this stuff and thinks like, huh, like there's not a lot of eggs today at the grocery store. And there's like a little bit of this entitled assumptiveness of clover? Grasses? That doesn't impact me! But it seems like there's this sensitivity of the food chain that maybe society is finally sort of coming to understand and appreciate beyond just people who spend their whole career in Ag Does that make sense?

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:17:40]:

Absolutely. So, I mean, first of all, like, I am not an Ag scientist, sure. But I grew up in a small town where we had almond orchards and agriculture all around me. But I think it's just because we have taken it for granted, right? So I spent last summer in rural Uganda, and rural Uganda was on the border of the DRC, Rwanda, and the Impenetrable Forest. This area is one of those what we call a hotspot in the world for infectious disease, which is why I was there. I had one of the members of the hospital come visit me from Uganda this last fall, and he stayed with me, and I took him to a grocery store, and he was just shocked, like, oh, well, what is this supposed to be? And I'm like, oh, that's bacon. It's, you know, sausage, you know, whatever. Because what they're used to is, like, you have a market.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:18:28]:

You have a market, and you can physically see you are grabbing a pig. Maybe the head's already off or whatever, but you have a pig, right? You are not in this, like, grocery store environment where you have all these options in the world. And we're so used to having all of these and not really thinking about how it affects us.

Jess Carter [00:18:47]:

Like, when kids realize their bacon is from a pig, and then you have, like, I don't want to eat it. It's like that. For in my family, it doesn't last very long, but it's that concept of there's a separation of what happens when my great grandma was out ringing the necks of her chickens when it was time to eat chicken, you know? And so, like, to your point, it just seems like there's a whole generation that sort of normalized that. I like that phrase you used of, like, almost the sanitized environment where everything came from. I just think it's really interesting.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:19:16]:

Yeah, yeah. And. And to your point earlier that you had said something about, like, well, like, what happens behind the cover when you're taught these conversations at these levels. And one of my favorite quotes that I saw on the back of a colleague's laptop during the pandemic, his quote on the laptop said, no one else is coming. We're it. It was that moment that, oh, when you peel behind the curtain, it is just humans like myself and others trying to make the best decision possible, like, doing what we can, right? There is no Wizard of Oz that is, like, almighty behind any of these curtains. It's a number of conversations from people to people to people, trying to access data and use data in a way that's meaningful.

Jess Carter [00:20:06]:

Right. Well, okay, so I have a scenario for you. So we're where we are with this egg problem. You are now the queen commissioner of the egg problem. You are in charge. We have blessed you. What are you thinking about? If suddenly you're in the spring of 2025, you're in charge of solving this and it's already more than kind of an outbreak. Like, what do we, what levers can be pulled about some of these things. Does that make sense?

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:20:34]:

Yeah, absolutely. First of all, people need to understand that although it would be fabulous to be able to work state by state, county by county, right? To be able to work with their systems, create electronic systems, have immediate data pools, right? See all that. The reality is our food chain is like a massive freeway system between all of our states. So a sick cow in California might have come originally from through Texas, but from Iowa. And so if you're trying to hunt down the chain of where this cow has been, and possibly right now they're using smartsheets, Excel, fax, email, phone call, you name it, fillable PDFs and there are tech tools that we can use now, right. That can help with this process. It won't fix the egg system, you know, the egg problem all the way, right?

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:21:31]:

And in our food, but it's a start. Come start with like data collection. How are we even collecting data? One state they might still be using, you know, the old fashioned, you know, like the three, three piece, like carbon copy. And they write, you know, their Ag inspectors are using, you know, cursive, right?

Jess Carter [00:21:48]:

Is that real? Like that's still happening somewhere, right?

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:21:51]:

Still happening today.

Jess Carter [00:21:52]:

Wow.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:21:52]:

But you can use technology. And we found, well, okay, fine, take that carbon copy, scan it in, and you can use AI to be able to read it and put it into a database, right? That's one way. Other states are now looking at, okay, state mobile phones, right? State mobile phones can have an app where you're doing data collection, talk to text, take pictures, the whole thing. And it can hit your data platform immediately for the collection point, right? From there you need to run an analytics layer and then be able to actually have actions on that analytics, not just to report out or up. Like I always tell people, they have plenty of data at every state. It's just that it's either latent data, it's not current, or it's data that they're using for reporting, for transparency, which is great, but that's not an action item. So I mean, for example, even when I was working in California, so during COVID, right? Skilled nursing facilities are one of the most deadliest locations for any infectious disease.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:22:50]:

Combination of acuity of the patient or the residents, as well as the types of locations that they are. And they're really, really confined, not really great air exchanges. And so one of the things that we decided was, okay, well, we can't just wait for an outbreak to happen because then it spreads like a wildfire in those facilities.

Jess Carter [00:23:10]:

Right.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:23:10]:

So instead, can we do something proactive and predictive? Can we pull up the last three years of any time they had an outbreak from just flu or MRSA or any other disease? Can we pull up compliance data from their infectious disease regulatory surveys? Can we pull up different types of community level, types of spread, right? And create algorithms, look at their staffing levels, and we were able to predict with 80 to 85% what was going to be the next facility that had an outbreak.

Jess Carter [00:23:39]:

Wow.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:23:40]:

And when you can do that and you have 1500 facilities but only 400 surveyors in a very large state, then you're able to then say, okay, here's our top 50 hit list. This is what you're working this week. These are the highest risk priorities. So if you start to look at your, your work by where are the highest risk locations to use your people and mitigate quickly?

Jess Carter [00:24:04]:

Yeah.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:24:04]:

Not only do we have the lowest case fatality ratio because of this, even despite having the largest amount of facilities, the key was you can't 3D-print people, right? You can get creative with space, you can get creative with supplies, but you can't get creative with staffing. And so it's basically data can be used as a tool to run analytics that can be targeted so that you can actually use your people in a more prescriptive way to have better outcomes.

Jess Carter [00:24:34]:

One of the things I want to ask you about was One Health. How close are we to that conversation right now? I mean, can you help me understand what, what is One Health? I mean, you've done, you've worked in global health security initiatives. What is it? And how does it better predict or prevent outbreaks?

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:24:49]:

Yes. So, so One Health, which is essentially just you combine environmental health data, animal health data, and human health data. And that is One Health. It's very simple. When people ask me, well, what is this, right? It was really something that came out from the global community, and particularly you can read a lot about it on the World Health Organization's website. And they focus a lot on this because the idea is, if you don't have clean water, like I don't want anyone to think that, oh, we have always clean water. Look at Flint, Michigan.

Jess Carter [00:25:20]:

Right.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:25:21]:

A lot of old lead pipes in our system. So don't be thinking that this is only relegated to low-income countries, right? Any of this can happen here. So you need, obviously, your environmental health data, you need your animal data, which we've now learned, right? We need our human health data and that trifecta, if you can create a great comprehensive disease surveillance system at a state level, to be able to then act on any one of those three things that might hit or flag, or some of them combine each other, right?

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:25:53]:

One affects one and one affects the other, right? And then it becomes this whole spiral. So if you can have access to that kind of data at a state level, you can do a lot. Whatever is your particular problem in your particular state, because it will be different for each state.

Jess Carter [00:26:08]:

Wow. So does it have to be one giant, like, enterprise data warehouse or is it like, no, this is about the interoperability of data between systems and agencies?

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:26:17]:

Obviously it starts with data collection, right? The speed, time to task for data collection. Yeah, Interoperability, data governance, right? Data sharing agreements and having them be able to understand the different roles that they want to create administratively, internally for who has access to act on each data.

Jess Carter [00:26:35]:

Is this like a dream in your head? Are there states that are like, no, they're on. They're on the roadmap to having this or they already. They have One Health. Where is that at a maturity scale right now?

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:26:44]:

We do have some states in the US that are 100% focused on this and they might call it different things and not knowing that they're doing One Health. And then there are other states that actually have an office of One Health. Our HHS agency, you know, some are calling it, you know, data interoperability, right? Every state's different, right? On how we're a comprehensive disease surveillance system. But no, there are several states that are trying to move to this initiative because they're seeing, especially with effects of extreme weather events happening, more natural disasters.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:27:17]:

And every single time, by the way, that you have a natural disaster, your environmental, animal, and human health are all interrupted. And so it just causes for concern for another outbreak.

Jess Carter [00:27:29]:

Okay. I could talk to you forever. This is so fascinating. And the fact that this gets to be the stuff you think about today, I mean, I just, I'm so grateful for your knowledge and abilities and the way that you apply them for people who aren't familiar with any of this, that One Health exercise, it's just really simple. But you understand how, how complex it is to actually operate, but it makes sense. Like, if you think about your life, your community, your society, it all tracks. In my head, it sounds so impressive that we could really look at health in this way that I get a little bit overwhelmed by how hard it would be to implement. Like if I was a state and I was like, you know, we haven't started this initiative and we really ought to start thinking about moving toward One Health.

Jess Carter [00:28:13]:

Like, what advice would you give?

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:28:16]:

Yeah, I would say it starts with relationships. Relationship building between the departments and the agencies to talk about where are there overlaps between their different authority points of where there could be some synergy. An example I'll give is when I talked about the skilled nursing, right. We discovered that a lot of the skilled nursing worker staff are in their childbearing ages. And we started to see this trend of, huh. We looked at the data from the child care outbreaks and if there was a child care outbreak within a mile radius of a skilled nursing facility, chances were there would be an outbreak at that facility. And so then we started to build those relationships with other departments and say, hey, this is why we want to be able to have access to your data, to be able to put it into this algorithm and it will also help you because then we can be able to share the outcomes and you can have certain levels of access so that then you can also prepare for staffing levels in your child care centers. By having that conversation and us seeing that there was mutual benefit, of course, with security in mind, cybersecurity in mind, and data governance and all of those things…by us sharing that data, not only were we able to save more elderly lives in the skilled nursing facilities, but we were able to reduce the amount of outbreaks in those care centers and make sure that they stayed open by them preparing for staffing levels for when there were outbreaks within their same mile radius.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:29:53]:

Because when you look at it, like, we live in communities, we don't live in vacuums. We go to stores, we go to schools, we have kids or parents that we care for, right? And we all live in these communities. And so when something happens in one part of our community, there most likely will be a ripple effect in the other part of our community. And so our data should also not sit in these silos, but be used in protective, of course, cyber-secure ways to be able to have some sort of shared data governance to be able to help in all of these areas.

Jess Carter [00:30:26]:

Do you have any quick thoughts on like, pitfalls to avoid as you pursue a One Health survey? Like, what have you seen where you're like, oh my gosh, the value would have been so substantive. But you did this.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:30:37]:

Yes, I see this all the time. Whether it's for approaching One Health. I also see this when people or different states are trying to approach their homelessness situation. All of these things take multiple different agencies to come together. And what I have seen is death by committee. Whether there is they set up an interagency agreement for like I've seen interagency homelessness councils that just go nowhere. They have their heads come and talk once a month and then they don't have progress. Same thing with One Health.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:31:08]:

You have agencies that do this kind of office, but no authority kind of thing. What I tell governments is you need to have an incident command structure. Just like you have for anything that you're wanting to do with change management or performance improvement or have side initiatives. Because most of our state governments and federal governments, we are operational managers, we have day jobs. You don't have the time and the day to really dedicate toward a huge massive change implementation. And so you need to be able to set up a, what I call like a little organizational change seal team, on the side that is an offshoot of that director to be able to run change initiatives at the same time and have a whole structure for how you do that. And there's ways to do that, whether it's for, like I said, the homelessness use case or One Health or any, just any internal change implementing different types of technology into their systems, all of that. You just need to be able to have that structure first.

Jess Carter [00:32:11]:

That is so neat and I love that it comes back to these really complex, big, hard human problems. Start with how do you help people change their behavior? I think that we are penciling you in for another conversation because I still need to interrogate you about all of your leadership skills, which are so impressive to me and a key part of Data-Driven Leadership. So Heidi, thank you for being on the episode today.

Dr. Heidi Steinecker [00:32:33]:

Oh, thank you.

Jess Carter [00:32:34]:

Thank you guys for listening. I'm your host, Jess Carter. Don't forget to follow the Data-Driven Leadership wherever you get your podcasts and rate and review letting us know how these data topics are transforming your business. We can't wait for you to join us on the next episode.