Race to Resilience Member Dr. Michael McDonald to Speak at Gov 2.0 Summit

racetoresilience — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:51:13 +0000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Michael McDonald

President: Global Health Initiatives, Inc.

Michael McDonald is director of the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure Pandemic Initiative. Dr. McDonald is chief architect of the U.S. Resilience System and is also currently President and CEO of Global Health Initiatives, Inc., and Executive Director of Health Initiatives Foundation Inc. He is Principal Investigator on the Disaster Knowledge Management System and the Global Resilience System testbed, which are oriented toward the prevention and management of large-scale social crises (e.g., disease outbreaks, terrorism, natural disasters, economic and social discontinuities) at the global, national, regional, and local levels.

Since 2003, an increasing amount of Dr. McDonald’s time has been committed to improving local, regional, national, and global responses to pandemic flu and other global threats. Dr. McDonald has led four large PanFlu exercises, including in summer 2006 with the top officers in the National Capital Region. He has provided speeches on Capital Hill with leading Senators and Congressman in the area of biosecurity emphasizing our vulnerabilities regarding pandemic flu. He debated Tony Fauci (Director of NIAID and one of President Bush’s key advisors on biosecurity) on BioShield on National Public Radio. He coordinated the U.S. Resilience Summit 2008, including a simulation of an event destabilizing the Southeast Asia food supply.

Dr. McDonald provided testimony to the Congressional Budget Office on key weaknesses of current U.S. pandemic flu policy. He has been an early voice for global, real-time, transparent biosurveillance systems and building infrastructures supporting situational awareness and verifiable resilience at the household, neighborhood and community levels. Dr. McDonald has made it clear that the local level is where the most life critical decisions will be made to stem the tide of infection during the first wave of a pandemic. He has chaired a panel on pandemic surveillance emerging from the 7/19/06 National Capital Region PanFlu Exercise and was principal author of the Surveillance Panel Report on Pandemic Surveillance Impacting the National Capital Region. Dr. McDonald discussed the Panel Report findings in the Aspen Institute Meeting on Pandemic Surveillance (including key thought leaders from the White House, UN, WHO, HHS, CDC, World Bank …) Dr. McDonald led the National Capital Region Pandemic Flu Simulation, and led the 2006 review of the District of Columbia Pandemic Flu Plan.

Dr. McDonald’s primary attention today is directed at building the next generation of health and crisis management systems integrating health care systems, emergency management, information technologies, community resilience, and knowledge science. Dr. McDonald continues to pioneer in the development of health information systems, virtual health management systems, decision support systems, knowledge management, evidence-based practices, health/humanitarian/disaster management command and control systems, and cross-media health and community empowerment. Dr. McDonald chaired the Genomics and Bioinformatics working group and was co-founder of the Bioterrorism working group of IEEE. Dr. McDonald is performing research in memetics and biosecurity in association with several universities and government agencies. He has been co-principal investigator with the Centers for Disease Control on the Psychosocial Dimensions of BioSecurity Initiative. Dr. McDonald is developing crisis management policy and technologies on global, national, state, and local levels.

Session Details

Michael McDonald (Global Health Initiatives, Inc.), Eric Rasmussen (InSTEDD), James Stogdill (Gestalt, now part of Accenture), Martin Stadtler (Red Hat)

12:05pm Thursday, 09/10/2009

General
Location: Independence Ballroom A

In this session we’ll examine how modern networks permit us to harness information flow to provide early warning and vastly improve our response to system-stressing events such as the H1N1 pandemic. Technologies available now offer governments and engaged citizens much better pandemic surveillance, situational awareness, and decision-making across all levels of response and can provide for much greater resilience. Jim Stogdill of Accenture serves as our moderator; he will be joined by two world class leaders in medicine, collaboration, resilience, and information technology: Michael McDonald, MD; President, Global Health Initiatives, Inc., and Eric Rasmussen, MD; CEO, INSTEDD, a .org begun with initial funding from Google to look for early signs of disease detection through innovative approaches to technology and collaboration.

http://www.gov2summit.com/public/schedule/speaker/66183

The Race to Resilience Defines Pandemic Action Steps

racetoresilience — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:16:46 +0000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 3, 2009, Washington, D.C.

As the 2009 Flu Season approaches, The H1N1 pandemic is rapidly moving from a preparation phase to a response stage. According to Dr. Michael McDonald, a member of the Race to Resilience, the nation must now focus on near term efforts to reduce the peak of the outbreak. A September 2, 2009 conference at the National Defense University set the stage for actionable steps to blunt the impact of the outbreak. The participants, from many different disciplines, laid plans for interactive Resilience networks in San Diego, Hawaii, Boston and West Oakland. The meeting included a number of key leaders from within government. Chris Allen, the CTO of the DHS Office of Health Affairs, shared best practices around information sharing, and highlighted the need to embrace reusable open source frameworks and technologies that can be shared between the public and private sector.

These interactive Resilience networks provide factual community based pandemic information using easy to read dashboards. They also permit community feedback in the form of blogs and real time feeds. The Race to Resilience is also examining self reporting flu sites that will enable Public Health officials to more rapidly dispatch resources to known hotspots. An online process known as Crowd Sourcing provides data well in advance of laboratory confirmation of spot outbreaks.

The Race to Resilience conference also focused on effective congressional liaison and methods to engage leading businesses that have already demonstrated a strong community commitment. Al Martinez-Fonts stressed that active business participation in communities would help disseminate necessary flu facts to employees, their families, customers and local communities where the companies operate.

The Race to Resilience serves as the civil sector focal point for non-pharmaceutical solutions to pandemic influenza. This entails an “all hands” effort bringing private, academia, and the public sector into a harmonious effort to reduce the impact of the expected second and third waves of the novel H1N1 pandemic.

For more information or to participate please visit www.racetoresilience.org.

Race To Resilience

Race to Resilience Member Dr. Michael McDonald to Speak at Gov 2.0 Summit

Michael McDonald

President: Global Health Initiatives, Inc.

Session Details

The Race to Resilience Defines Pandemic Action Steps