Understanding decision context to improve heat health information

The National Integrated Heat Health Informa tion System (NIHHIS) Northeast Decision Calendar Workshop convened 42 heat-health decision-makers from public health, athletics, city and regional planning, elderly affairs, climate, meteorology, emergency management, energy, and decision science disciplines. The workshop sought to advance understanding of the information needs of this community by better characterizing the context of these needs—considering local climate, policy, culture, socioeconomics, and other factors. Participants discussed their roles in managing heat-health risks in order to explore where they have had successes, where they have met challenges, and where opportunities exist to improve risk reduction efforts. The workshop and its work products are part of the National Integrated Heat Health Information System, which was jointly launched by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to improve heat-health risk reduction efforts through improved understanding of risk and application of information by decision-makers. Developing this information requires a persistent investment in relationships with the user community across many disciplines. However, integrating information across disciplines and time scales, each with its own terms of art and frames of reference, can be very challenging. To address this challenge, we employed in this workshop the concept of decision calendars, detailed in the next section, to elicit this information in a structured way.