The UN Foundation is in the early phases of a ground-breaking partnership with AWhere that could last five or ten years or longer. Kevin Starace, United Nations Foundation (UNF) Senior Malaria Advisor, spoke to AWhere at length this week about the project.
Please review Part I -- background, location as 'common denominator' for data and open-source science.Part II:
AWhere: The thing that jumps to mind is like a NASA Command Center, with a big map up on the wall and hundreds of people looking up at it all the time. Is that a silly idea inspired by too many movies?
Starace: (Laughs) Not really. I think the UN Secretary General and Director General of the WHO and every leader of every organization should be able to hit a few keys on their keyboard and see all the issues they are facing in real time. Just like buyer from Macy's checks their sales data every day, everyone should check what's going on.
AWhere: So, I guess they don't do that today?
Starace: We are just now (September '08) getting comprehensive reports on malaria data from 2006 and 2007. We'd want the report of an outbreak in Africa to reach the Director General's office – and everyone's office – in 90 seconds.
One thing John talks about that's really exciting is being able to use information as a prediction. Given his background in agricultural climatology, John, and many other scientists, can tell me that a certain rainfall and weather pattern is highly likely to result in a new generation of mosquitos, which, given other measurable and knowable factors, may lead to an outbreak of malaria.
Until now, we have only used information in this realm to help us determine how we've done; it's always been historical. We've never been able to use information as a forward looking tool, but that's one important thing AWhere helps us do.
When I think about this I realize that we can get an alert about a particular region in Ghana that may be primed for an outbreak, we can get in the way of that happening.
AWhere: That's an interesting point. We've talked mostly about information flow from the field to the lab and the board room. What about the flow of information from scientists to local health workers?
Starace: We're going to start with a focus on the national health ministry, they are next step in education process. Down the road, we can imagine integrating regional health centers, and ultimately delivering timely, relevant info to cell phones in villages, but for right now, we are focusing on doing better data collection at that level.
AWhere: Isn't that data collection one of the real challenges today?
Starace: It is, but it's important to realize that we are working on this system within a larger context. One parallel project is our partnership with Vodaphone to get PDAs and cell phones into the mix to collect more and more information that gets closer and closer to real time. We are working closely with a small network of local health monitors and health officers to help this behavior change.
But the systems have to work together. Without a place to collect, organize, compare and visualize it, the new information won't provide as much value.
AWhere: Why do you say that?
Starace: Each organization and each sector has different ways to collecting, verifying and reviewing information. In a spreadsheet, there is no way to compare the World Bank's financial flows info with UNICEF's health data that maps the distribution and life span of bed nets, plus UN population info and publicly available data on agriculture, weather and more. Then try to compare programmatic information from Gates Foundation, UNF, USAID, DFID, African health ministries... you get the picture. From a spreadsheet perspective, the information is too dissimilar. We can not compare these things today.
But on a map – with location as the common denominator – we can look at all of these different data sets and actually see the correlations. where is the only tool I know that allows us to calibrate our efforts while creating open and recurrent information systems.
AWhere: Well, needless to say, we're pretty excited. When do you think this will start to have an impact?
Starace: It's a long term process, and that's what makes AWhere so exciting to everyone in the health community -- how effective we can be in 5 years, in 10 years.
Without a better, more timely and more accurate understanding of the problem, we can't know when we have gotten to that key point in time – 10 years, hopefully – when we have confidence in calibrating our understanding of where malaria is still a problem, and where it's not.
Think about it this way -- if we don't know what else is going on in the 40 mile radius of a problem area, we can't be sure how to solve the problem. And the breadth of information necessary to make health decisions transcends health, so we need all the systems integrated.
AWhere: So you're looking at a 5-year and 10-year horizon. Is anything happening today that demonstrates some small success that indicates it's actually going to work?
Starace: Even in prototype it is changing how we organize and think about investments in malaria and is opening minds to the inherent integration of development.
AWhere: Kevin, thanks for taking the time. Any closing thoughts?
Starace: The ability to geographically correlate meaningful information from disparate sources in real time will forever alter our ability to improve the lives of people around the world. That has never been possible before, and it's literally going to change everything.
About the United Nations Foundation (UNF) As the UNF Senior Malaria Advisor, Kevin Starace, works not only within the UNF, but across the global network of malaria researchers that span the United States Agency For International Development (USAID), United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID), United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, Global Fund, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, malaria endemic countries, NGO’s and academia under the Roll Back Malaria Partnership and campaign to end malaria In short, he's at the hub of the information connection and collaboration of the world's effort to eradicate malaria.
