Dominic Thomas
In 2012, shortly after joining Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School as an Assistant Professor, along with my team at TEPHINET, I was awarded a $3 million grant from the Skoll Foundation Global Threats Fund along with a collaborative group including HealthMap and ProMED. We worked with an international team of collaborators to build and deploy new technology for disease surveillance and response, Epicore.
The grant grew out of a proposal I developed, “Enhancing the Detection and Validation of Emerging Disease Outbreaks,” while consulting for TEPHINET (the Training Programs in Epidemiology and Health Interventions Network), a professional network connecting 55 field epidemiology training programs around the world. As Suffolk’s announcement of the award put it at the time, I served as systems architect and technical lead for the resulting Epicore Digital Disease Detection project, working alongside organizations including HealthMap at Harvard Medical School and ProMED, the pioneering global reporting system for emerging infectious disease. As part of the grant, I also helped run the 2nd International Conference on Digital Disease Detection in San Francisco, bringing together innovators from health and technology to work on disease surveillance methods.
The technical challenge was less about any single algorithm than about the surrounding system: how do you get thousands of field epidemiologists, informal outbreak reports, and automated web-scraping tools to feed a shared picture of an emerging threat, fast enough and reliably enough for public health officials to act on it? That question connected directly back to earlier CDC-funded work I had done from 2006 to 2011 on collaboration and coordination systems inside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention itself and with global epidemiology partners, and to a 2010 U.S. CDC-funded study on the ethics of pandemic influenza response across Asian public health systems — work that brought together ministries of health, health educators, philosophers, and politicians to think through the ethical dimensions of a coordinated regional pandemic response.
This period also included directing Suffolk’s (endowed) Center for Innovative Collaboration Leadership, where I led an overhaul of the MBA program around new Innovate and Collaborate core courses, completed a $100,000 endowment gift from the Terino Foundation, and built an Innovation Fellows program for student and faculty research — institution-building work that ran in parallel with the global health systems work, both driven by the same conviction: that the hardest part of “digital” disease detection, or any large-scale innovation effort, is rarely the software. It is getting the people, incentives, and institutions around that software to actually use it.