Commodities are spotlighted frequently in the news these days. With inflation spiking, there’s been an increase in the media coverage about the rising costs of commodities such as food and fuel. Every time I see news about the topic, I think about environmental health. Why, you may wonder. In my opinion, environmental health is often treated like a commodity, which is dangerous for the future of the environmental health industry, the dedicated professionals within it, and the communities they keep safe.

The Dangers of “Commoditized Thinking” for Environmental Health

First, it’s easy to forget about commodities until it’s too late. That is, we really only worry about a commodity when it’s broken. Think of fuel, water, electricity, or any utility we rely on each day. We typically don’t do much proactive work to address them until they go out. While this approach is ok for some basic utilities, it doesn’t work well for environmental and public health. Just look at the challenges surrounding the response to the pandemic. We simply did not have enough government funding set aside for proactive emergency preparedness for a major health crisis like COVID-19. The end result has been a catastrophic impact on people and companies, especially small businesses, which are the lifeblood of the US economy.

Second, taxpayer and government funding often goes towards putting out raging fires, not smoke or spark-level incidents. In a previous blog post, I wrote about environmental health being at an inflection point and received a thoughtful comment by Tim Callahan a Program Director at the Georgia Department of Public Health. Tim noted that funding for public and environmental health simply has not kept up with population and inflation increases across the United States. Tim’s comment read:

“The failure to have public health funding match inflation or population growth for the past 30 years has results that worsened our ability to respond to the COVID emergency.”

This type of reactionary thinking, which I’ll call “commoditized thinking,” has led to gradual budget cuts for environmental health departments over the years. The pandemic only made matters worse, as EH funds were rapidly siphoned to COVID-facing teams in other departments. Thus, environmental health resources for employees, programs, and technology have been sent elsewhere, which puts our communities at greater risk for smoke/spark level incidents to grow into the next major crisis.

Commoditized Thinking leads to less technological innovation

Which brings me to the final reason for concern. Commoditized thinking leads to less technological innovation. When a single factor can dramatically shift a commoditized market, such as fuel reduction requirements at the start of the pandemic, there tends to be less corporate innovation because there isn’t as much marginal productivity to optimize. Technology is most helpful when it is used to significantly improve worker productivity.

Craig Wetherbee a Director of Environmental Health summed up this risk well in his comment from my previous blog post:

“COVID has done no favors for anyone, least of all those in Public Health and Environmental Health. I think a painful lesson learned in our small EH office is that we were unable to make the best use of our software suite in this pandemic. Whether that comes down to training or an aging software platform, the lack of flexibility left us struggling to create new ways to respond to the needs of our community.”

Lastly, we can do more within the technology sector for our public health officials. Whether it’s massive public companies with big political capital like Google and Facebook down to private companies that are building software features that allow public and environmental health officials to do their jobs more safely, we must all take a hard look in the mirror. At Hedgerow Software we’ll keep doing our best to build highly specialized software for environmental health professionals, you can count on that.

I’d like to know what you’ll do too. Please leave a comment or connect with me on LinkedIn to help us remedy this public health crisis for the betterment of our communities.