Medical student James E.K. Hildreth was on his first clinical rotation when he saw the patient, a Black woman in her early 20s who had just given birth. It was the early 1980s and AIDS was spreading, with no treatment for the virus. Both the mother and her baby did not make it. “There was nothing we could do except treat their symptoms and watch them die,” Dr. Hildreth says quietly. The experience so affected him he changed his specialty from training to be a transplant surgeon to an HIV investigator. He became one of the world’s top HIV/AIDS researchers, with much of his work focusing on blocking HIV infection by learning how it gets into cells. Now, as president and CEO of Meharry Medical College in Nashville, one of the nation’s oldest and largest historically Black academic health science centers, he sees similarities between the AIDS era and the COVID-19 pandemic responses – initial reluctance by some government officials to acknowledge the gravity of the virus and its impact on people of color – and says they must not be repeated. [caption id="attachment_442861" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]

Dr. James E.K. Hildreth, president and CEO of Meharry Medical College in Nashville. (Photo courtesy of Meharry Medical College)[/caption] “There’s a lot that we learned,” Dr. Hildreth says. “But one thing we learned for sure is that we need to do a better job of diversifying our health care work force. We need to spend more money on public health and preventive medicine to prevent this from happening again. And it also illustrates the importance of improving the basic health status of all of us, so that the next time this happens, we won’t be having the same conversation again. This is not the last pandemic for sure.” Meharry is among the academic institutions and nonprofit organizations that are grantees of Microsoft AI for Health, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) and Azure high-performance computing to help improve the health of people and communities worldwide. AI for Health was launched a few months before COVID-19, and once the pandemic struck, more than 180 AI for Health grants went to those on the front lines of COVID-19 research, data and insights. John Kahan, Microsoft vice president, Chief Data Analytics Officer and global lead for the AI for Health program, says when the pandemic started, so little information was known, and there was a massive race for data and insights. [caption id="attachment_442849" align="alignleft" width="280"]

John Kahan, Microsoft vice president, Chief Data Analytics Officer and global lead for the AI for Health program.[/caption] “I think that our learning is in better shape now,” he says. “The science is in better shape. But it is still unclear that the governments of the world have gotten together on a common set of standards” around exactly what data must be gathered immediately after a pandemic has been declared. Other AI for Health grantees, including Brown University School of Public Health, the Institute for Health Metrics and Morehouse School of Medicine, agree about the work that remains to be done. Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, is a pandemic expert who now is also a familiar face to many television viewers in the U.S. for his perspectives. Using Azure and Power BI, Brown and Microsoft AI for Health developed a comprehensive COVID-19 dashboard that includes whether states in the U.S. are meeting COVID-19 testing target numbers, risk levels for each county in the country, and vaccine distribution and administration data. The dashboard also includes worldwide figures, and has become a helpful tool for the public, as well as for policymakers and leaders, to gauge the progress of the vaccine rollout. [caption id="attachment_442850" align="alignright" width="280"] Portrait of the Dean of the School of Public Health Ashish Jha

Portrait of the Dean of the School of Public Health Ashish Jha

Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. (Photo courtesy of Brown University)[/caption] What’s important about it and other COVID-19-related dashboards that have since been created is that they represent the first time such important tools have become widely available. “Fundamentally the public health system’s data infrastructure (during COVID-19) sort of worked a little, but not nearly enough,” Dr. Jha says. “Every public health department in the U.S. has its own data infrastructure for collecting information on infections, tests, hospitalizations and deaths – and they’re really, really old, clunky systems,” Dr. Jha says. “What that means is that there are places across the country when somebody has a positive COVID-19 test, they might send that information to their local health department by literally printing out the test result, and faxing it to the local health department, who will then hand-enter it into a computer system. This is how data is still largely being collected.” It hindered the COVID-19 response in the U.S., Dr. Jha says. “At a national level, until very recently, we had no government-driven data on infections and cases and deaths. In fact, national data was being aggregated by a group of journalists who were pulling together data and cleaning it up across every state and putting it together. Even the previous White House (administration) was largely using this data as opposed to using federal data.” Dr. Jha says a collection of anonymized, non-health related data – such as restaurant reservations made through an app – also are “incredibly helpful” in providing information about people’s behaviors during the pandemic, such as their willingness to go out for dinner. “It’s really a way of measuring people’s sense of safety in their community,” he says. “For example, we saw reservation numbers fall as infection numbers began to rise, well before any policy was made on shutting down restaurants.”

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