Date: Sept. 17, 2013
Staff Representative: Scott Fisher, Andy Roszak, Laura Biesiadecki, Frances Bevington
Member Representative: N/A
Highlights: Staff met with representatives of First Watch Solutions, including Dr. Alexander Garza, former assistant secretary for health affairs and chief medical officer of the Department of Homeland Security. First Watch provides real-time situational awareness and automated alerting for public health directors, epidemiologists and other staff via interactive web-based tools by monitoring 911 calls, electronic patient care reports and hospital data. During the call, representatives from FirstWatch and NACCHO discussed how the tools could be used to help local health departments identify potentially threatening health trends and patterns or geographic clusters of occurrences in real time.