...## Tracking progress
[No, not progress just more of your.....]
Once public-health goals are defined, it will be important to track progress toward them and communicate it to the US public. Two principles could guide how federal, state, and local governments may best achieve that:
- Communicating vital signs simply. Communicating data in simple ways could help governments reach a comprehensive set of constituents. Many US states have made investments to improve the quality of data and data visualization tools to democratize public-health information, enabling their constituents to understand what is happening in their own communities. Continuing to advance these solutions could enable governments to align the goals that define the next normal to a system of alerts akin to air quality level and forest fire risk level, for example. That may enable policy decisions to be adapted transparently based on public-health conditions. Separately, providing individuals with access to data on the public-health condition of their communities could allow them to determine their own risk appetites.
- Reinforcing health data infrastructure and public-health surveillance systems. Public-health surveillance, with tracking and early intervention of any new variants, will likely prove critical in the next normal. Governments could play a pivotal role in deepening public-health infrastructure and investing in surveillance capabilities to ensure that any changes in population health can be detected early and monitored thoroughly to minimize the severity of outbreaks. Establishing robust integrated data sets from across healthcare stakeholders, public sources, and private sources—as well as the means to determine insights quickly and efficiently—will further strengthen the ability to understand or anticipate risks. Next-generation surveillance may require the use of a broader set of bioinformatics tools (such as genomic sequencing to detect variant mutations and wastewater-monitoring systems to detect community transmission).