In early 2020, as they tried using to fight covid-19 across two rural counties in North Carolina, the team of Granville Vance Community Health and fitness was stymied, relying on outdated engineering to observe a quick-shifting pandemic. Lisa Macon Harrison, the agency’s health director, explained her nurses’ contact-tracing process expected manually moving into situation information and facts into five details methods. One particular was decades aged and sophisticated. Another was created of Excel spreadsheets. None labored well together or with systems at other stages of government. “We ended up applying a ton of assets placing an inordinate sum of information into multiple units that weren’t always scaled to communicate to…