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InSTEDD Team Blogs

InSTEDD Team Blogs


Phnom Penh Innovation Lab team giving its first steps!September 30

After months of work in the region, our technology team in Cambodia has started their daily work! We had our first standup meetings last week!

As part of InSTEDD's strategy of 'sustainable innovation' we are creating a full engineering team that over time owns and reinvents technologies used in the region. All technologies go obsolete - so for true sustainability you need to assemble a team of people that will invent the 'next thing' - and give it the skills, capital and opportunities to do so.

It's one of those rare, beautiful moments in the professional life of anyone: seeing a team's first day, the getting to know each other, starting to create a work culture, picking a set of small challenges and taking them on. Some moments stick - first standup, seeing the first code checkin notification, hearing the first idea that is "so obvious and locally appropriate yet no one in the global team had thought about it".

It starts with the people, so here they are:

Collaborative Analytics and Environment for Linking Early Event Detection to an Effective ResponseSeptember 7
A system for early detection, situational awareness and coordinated response is essential to effectively mitigate the threat (morbidity and mortality) of a health-related event and to improve health. The progress made to-date in biosurveillance worldwide is significant and should be evolved to meet existing and emerging needs. There are existing processes, relationships, technologies, policies, infrastructures, and advances in science and technology that provide a solid foundation to a truly integrated biosurveillance solution. Of paramount importance is the need to strengthen the capacity and enable data-driven decision-making of public health services from the local to the district, national and global levels—both strategically and tactically.

In looking at the current landscape; however, we found the majority of the designs, analyses and evaluations of early detection (or biosurveillance) systems have been geared towards specific data sources and detection algorithms. Much less effort has been focused on how these systems will "interact" with humans. For example, consider multiple domain experts working at different levels across different organizations in an environment where numerous biosurveillance algorithms may provide contradictory interpretations of ongoing events.

Nico and I have been working on project codenamed RNA (or Event Evolution) to provide the public health, di



InSTEDD introduction in AsiaSeptember 4
I usually watch my very bright and articulate colleagues post blogs, but it’s been a great few weeks, with a collection of significant public efforts, and some of the efforts need notice. Let’s try a few photos this time.

My last blog was related to the Myanmar cyclone and our work on Sahana translation into Burmese, and, in the background, a very little about the Sichuan earthquake in China. I need to catch up a bit and put some other recent events in context.

Here at InSTEDD we’ve done a few things over the past three months that would be worth describing in detail but this blog would be excessively long. I’ll keep it more brief by just mentioning that we’ve:

1. Had useful meetings with the Gates Foundation,

2. Given a nice presentation at the Pacific Health Forum,

3. Hosted an interesting dinner at the Pacific Health Forum on "Ethics in Information Dissemination within Low-Resource Environments" (with WHO, PATH, Gates, Veratect, Grameen Bank, and a dozen others),

4. Chaired a useful workshop at SciFoo Camp on “Discovering Emerging Infections”,

5. Had some good conversations with HealthMap at Harvard on integrating our complimentary toolsets,

6. Presented at Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum on using collaborative tools fo















InSTEDD Presentation at HISAJuly 8

Here is the presentation we gave at HISA.

  • Brief intro about InSTEDD,
  • An overview of information flow challenges in health we found in Cambodia which we hear are also present in other contexts,
  • How collaboration can help with those challenges, and concretely, what are the technologies InSTEDD is focusing to help with that collaboration and information flow,
  • A quick overview of method: Agile practices, trying to be a good OSS neighbor, and the innovation lab we are building in Cambodia to bring the field needs and local creativity into the very first steps of future tech development.

I believe any sustainability planning is at its core an exercise in business modeling. At InSTEDD we think one way we could attain this elusive sustainability is to shift focus from having beneficiaries sustaining external efforts, into creating an environment with the capacity to generate and grow new innovations. It's harder, and there's no silver bullet, but still worth learning to do right.

PD: This first slide always gets folks' attention, by design...

Medicine 2.0™ Congress: Social Networking and Web 2.0 Applications in Medicine and HealthJune 30
I am speaking at the Medicine 2.0™ conference on adapting and adopting social networking methods for biosurveillance. The conference is taking place in Ontario, CA on Sept4-5, 2008. "Medicine 2.0™ is an international conference on Web 2.0 applications in health and medicine, organized and co-sponsored by the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the International Medical Informatics Association, the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, CHIRAD, and a number of other sponsoring organizations." The congress was organized by Dr. Gunther Eysenbach.

Here is a list of the final accepted abstracts and the Medicine 2.0™ Blog site...

I am very interested in hearing your thoughts and any input you can provide to help me better present the topic. Definitely if you know of existing or related work that I can reference will be much appreciated...

And as my friend Susanne Jul would say: Gunalchéesh [thank you,