Sauk County’s AI Work Cited in AJPH, Alongside New York City, Chicago, and the CDC
On August 13, 2026, the American Journal of Public Health published an editorial that names Sauk County, Wisconsin as one of a handful of examples of public health already using AI well. The tools behind that example are PH360™, built by F&T Labs with Public Health Sauk County.
The editorial, “Reimagining Governmental State and Local Public Health Practice in the Era of AI: Why Public Health Must Engage With AI Now,” is by Jennifer E. Layden, MD, PhD, of Washington University in St. Louis, and John Auerbach, MBA, of ICF. Their argument is that the question “is no longer whether AI will be used in public health practice but how it will be designed, governed, and aligned with public health values.”
To show what that looks like in practice, they point to places already doing it:
- New York City flew AI-enabled drones during a Legionella outbreak to find the cooling towers that could be breeding the bacteria.
- Chicago used AI to decide where to send restaurant inspectors with a limited staff.
- Sauk County, Wisconsin “used AI-driven tools to improve extraction of critical information from clinical text, freeing up epidemiologists’ time for other tasks.”
- The CDC has published both operational and outbreak-specific examples.
Sauk County serves more than 65,000 people. It is on that list next to the largest and third-largest cities in the country.
What PH360 does in Sauk County
The source the editorial cites is a project funded by the Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment: “Empowering Sauk County’s Public Health Workforce with AI Tools for Enhanced Efficiency and Equity,” awarded to Public Health Sauk County in January 2025. Jennifer Weitzel, PhD, RN, Sauk County’s Director and Health Officer, led it. F&T Labs was the community partner and built the tools. Over nine months, the project put two PH360 tools into daily use:
- Food Code chat. An environmental health specialist asks a question in plain language and gets the FDA Food Code citation back, instead of paging through the code. Read how the Food Code tool works.
- TB case investigation. PH360 pulls the relevant details out of electronic case reports and assembles them, so the epidemiologist reviews a draft instead of reading and re-keying each report. This is the clinical-text work the AJPH editorial describes.
Both give time back to a department that, like most in Wisconsin, has been losing staff. Wisconsin health departments lost 15% of their essential staff over the past decade.
Why a county of 65,000 is on this list
The editorial lays out five steps every health department should take this year: engage the community, adopt governance, train staff, run early pilots, and measure the results. On pilots, the authors are specific. Pick one that can be built in three to six months, meets a real need for agency staff, and can be evaluated.
That is what Sauk County did. Two bounded problems. Nine months. A tool the staff could check against the source, because PH360 shows its citations. The department did not wait for a finished AI strategy before starting, and the editorial’s point is that nobody should.
“Even the smallest health departments should take these first steps scaled to their size and resources.”
Layden and Auerbach, AJPH, August 2026
We are proud of Jennifer and her team. Sauk County did the hard part, which was deciding to start. We are glad PH360 was part of it.
Layden JE, Auerbach J. Reimagining governmental state and local public health practice in the era of AI: why public health must engage with AI now. Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print August 13, 2026. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2026.308567
Try PH360 on your own Food Code question
The Food Code chat Sauk County uses is in the free trial. Ask it the question an inspector asked you last week and read the citation back yourself. Or book 30 minutes and we will do it with you.
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