A few years ago, while I was supervising HIV surveillance data for a city of more than two million residents, I remember a conversation about whether we had “enough” demographic detail in our case records to say anything meaningful about disparities. The honest answer was: it depended entirely on decisions made long before anyone asked […]

When people hear “disease surveillance,” they usually picture something abstract — dashboards, case counts, maybe a map with dots on it. What they don’t picture is the actual work: a small team of epidemiologists and data analysts combing through case reports every week, looking for patterns that don’t announce themselves. That’s what Cluster Detection and […]

Every health department I’ve worked in has had at least one dashboard nobody looks at anymore. It was probably impressive when it launched — clean charts, live data feeds, maybe even a leadership demo. Six months later, it’s a tab nobody opens. This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a design problem, and it’s one of […]

There’s a specific kind of stress that comes with running two emergency responses at once. During my time with a municipal COVID-19 response team, I spent a stretch managing pandemic operations and an emerging Monkeypox outbreak simultaneously — separate case definitions, separate reporting lines, separate stakeholder groups, and one team that had to hold all […]

Public health has no shortage of people who can read an epidemic curve. It has a real shortage of people who can also read a budget, write a grant proposal that survives review, and manage a project through a government procurement process without losing momentum. That gap is one of the most consistent bottlenecks I’ve […]

Before I worked in surveillance systems and data dashboards, I worked in a district hospital operating room in Bassila, Benin, performing abdominal surgeries, laparoscopic procedures, and endoscopies for a rural population with limited access to specialized care. It’s about as far from a KPI framework as clinical work gets. But it’s where I first understood […]

I spent my early career as a physician — first as an emergency physician, then as a general surgeon, treating patients in district hospitals in Benin. Years later, I lead epidemiologic surveillance and data programs at health departments in the United States. On paper, those look like two different careers. In practice, they’re the same […]