Emerging Trends in Public Health
Sharing Session - 60 Minutes
John Corbin, BS
Informatics Administrator
Garrett County Health Department
Shelley Argabrite, MA
Chief Health Strategist
Garrett County Health Department
What does it take to replicate an open source public health innovation? Join us on our journey as we cover conceptualizing, developing, testing, launching, evaluating, refactoring, packaging, and releasing an open source public health innovation.
The Garrett Community Planning Tool, located at MyGarrettCounty.com, was piloted as an open source innovation in the central Appalachian community of Garrett County, Maryland to determine whether or not a digital collaborative could be successfully deployed to increase community participation in health improvement planning processes. The innovation pilot project initially set out with two main objectives: increase transparency through the reporting of hyper local data sourced from multisectoral community stakeholders and improve equity practices through increasing community representation by allowing any stakeholder, regardless of background or status, to contribute to existing or create new community health improvement solutions and action groups.
Following the highly anticipated release of these open source plug-ins, the Public Health National Center for Innovations and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded a highly competitive replication cycle to determine how incredibly diverse communities could utilize this open source code base and infrastructure as a backbone for promoting health equity and fostering hyper local data collection across sectors.