BUILDING THE INFRASTRUCTURE THAT HAS NEVER EXISTED
Skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) and health departments still coordinate outbreaks by fax, phone, and disconnected systems
Skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) and health departments still coordinate outbreaks by fax, phone, and disconnected systems
Skilled nursing and long-term care facilities track and report infectious disease activity through a patchwork of faxes, phone calls, and disconnected systems – and the public health agencies they report to receive it the same fragmented way. Outbreak Watch collects each case once and routes it to every channel that accepts a structured submission, so the facility and its health department work from the same record.
A cordon sanitaire – French for “sanitary cordon” – is a line drawn around an outbreak to keep it from spreading. The term dates to 1821, when France posted troops along the Pyrenees to hold back a yellow fever epidemic in Spain, and the tool is still in use: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone drew one during the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Cordon Health keeps the name and leaves the wall behind. Its cordon is shared information, so the facility where an outbreak starts and the health department that contains it work from the same record.
Cordon Health was founded by people who managed outbreak response at California health departments and skilled nursing facilities during COVID, and who spent that time working around tools never designed for the job.

Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Product architecture and technology. PhD Economics, UC Berkeley; BA Econometrics and Ethics, Stanford. Former business director in FinTech and EdTech, delivering enterprise decisioning products from zero to one. Machine learning productization, causal inference, data governance.

Co-Founder & Chief Financial Officer
Strategy and capital markets. 30+ years in capital markets at Hambrecht & Quist, J.P. Morgan and HSBC. Investment strategy, ESG analytics, startup growth modeling. Volunteered with Marin County Public Health's COVID testing and outbreak team.

Co-Founder
Epidemiology and health informatics. Yale MPH; more than fifteen years at the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) and California local health departments. Led the epi unit's COVID outbreak response across multiple California jurisdictions. GIS-based surveillance systems and multi-jurisdictional outbreak investigations.

Head of Communications
Public health nursing and stakeholder engagement. Registered nurse with a background in communicable disease investigation in public and correctional health. Marin County Public Health: outbreak investigation, community intervention, COVID-19 community response, and emergency preparedness. FEMA pandemic influenza grant liaison.
This team did not read about the problem in a research paper. They lived it, repeatedly, from both sides of the boundary between a facility and its health department.
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