Empowering Sauk County's Public Health Workforce with AI Tools for Enhanced Efficiency and Equity

Project Summary:

Local health departments across Wisconsin face significant resource constraints, having lost 15% of essential staff in the past decade while managing increasing responsibilities. In Sauk County, with more than 65,000 residents across rural and urban communities, these challenges affect the department's ability to efficiently handle crucial tasks like disease surveillance and environmental health inspections. While artificial intelligence tools could help automate repetitive tasks, concerns about data privacy and HIPAA compliance have prevented many health departments from leveraging these technologies.

Public Health Sauk County will partner with Flourish and Thrive Labs to expand their successful AI pilot program using HIPAA-compliant Amazon Web Services (AWS) Bedrock. The initiative will focus on two critical areas: enhancing electronic case reporting by creating direct connections with federal systems and automating data extraction, and developing an AI interface for environmental health records management to expedite public records requests. This approach builds on a successful proof-of-concept that demonstrated significant time savings in case investigations through AI-powered data processing.

This project will create a model for how local health departments can leverage emerging technologies to improve service delivery while maintaining data security. By automating time-consuming manual processes, the initiative will allow public health staff to focus on high-impact activities requiring human expertise, such as prenatal home visits and restaurant inspections. The project addresses equity issues faced by small rural health departments that often lack resources for implementing innovative technologies, with the potential for scaling these solutions across Wisconsin's public health system.

Community Partners: Flourish & Thrive Labs