Get to Know Anna Kaplan

Anna Kaplan, Director of Epidemiology and Data Services at the Cambridge Public Health Department (CPHD), knows that for most people, the first thing that comes to mind when they think about epidemiology is the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is true that the impacts of COVID were, and remain, a significant part of her job, but Kaplan’s work expands well beyond this.

“Depending on the week and time of year, a good amount of my time is focused on disease response control. What that has looked like, and is maybe most familiar to people, is our COVID response,” Kaplan said. “But in the summer, actually, it’s a little bit quieter in terms of respiratory disease, as you can imagine. I do a little more project-based work.”

Often, this project-based work involves collaborating with and supporting other units within CPHD.

“The Epidemiology and Data Services division works as sort of an internal support group to all the different public health department units, in addition to our communicable disease function,” Kaplan said. “So, if the Healthy Eating and Active Living group wants support getting data about a program and evaluating it, we work on that.”

Working with epidemiology, and data more broadly, feels especially meaningful to Kaplan because it touches at the heart of what she finds most important about healthcare—understanding how to keep people healthy on a systematic scale.

“I actually started as an EMT … but very quickly got very frustrated with how often the same people were needing emergency care for needs that weren’t being met by the healthcare system,” she said. “And so I got interested in public health because it’s more of, how do you prevent the bad outcome in the first place at a systems level? Versus having to treat the same person for something that, maybe if they could access care a little earlier, wouldn’t have been the case.”

Kaplan says that ensuring their care reaches the people and communities who need it most is the crux of CPHD’s work, and this was perhaps never more apparent than during the pandemic, when the department had to navigate an equitable and safe vaccine rollout. 

Following the initial vaccination of healthcare workers and first responders, CPHD decided to prioritize homeless shelters and senior public housing buildings with the remainder of the limited initial supply.

“We had a little vaccine left and this becomes a huge ethical and moral question of who should access this, and what we decided was, how do we make sure that, considering both the acute nature of the moment, who’s most at risk for severe disease, and long term, who is going to have trouble accessing this, [and] who for really valid historical reasons, is not going to want to access this,” Kaplan said.

Kaplan described how powerful of a moment it was watching seniors in public housing receive the COVID vaccine.

“That was one of my favorite memories, actually,” Kaplan said. “Being in some of the senior buildings and looking down the hall … everyone’s in the hall and we have a bunch of interpreters. You hear a ton of different languages being spoken, displaying the vaccine, people, just the sounds and sights of it all were really important to me.”

These targeted vaccine clinics have continued after the initial wave of COVID vaccination, as have wider public vaccination clinics. Beyond just COVID, this approach to targeting services to those who need them most reflects Kaplan’s and CPHD’s focus on understanding the social determinants of health. She explains these as outside factors that affect someone’s health and access to healthcare, as opposed to placing blame on individual choices.

“One way you can say is, ‘Oh, that person is unhealthy. They’ve made bad choices.’ Not true,” Kaplan said. “That person is unhealthy, what are all the factors that have led them to that point, that have prevented them from accessing care, that made them not want to go to the doctor, that made them unable to access nutritious food, all those things? So that’s the approach we take.”

In addition, Kaplan and CPHD work closely with Cambridge Public Schools, including by hosting vaccine clinics there. 

“We did a lot of work doing vaccine access for those families,” she said. “So that people could be safe starting school and summer camp and also sharing a large open space.”

Kaplan especially enjoys the individual connections she makes with members of the community through her work, noting that while public health can sometimes feel like a slow-moving field, she understands that it also has a direct impact on the lives of individuals.

“It’s very hard to walk down the street and not run into somebody we’ve met at some program we’ve offered, or who has come to the health department looking for some service,” Kaplan said. “I enjoy talking to people and really feeling the tangible effects of what we do.”

This strong sense of community is also what she loves most about Cambridge as a whole. Kaplan is an avid walker, biker, and hiker, and no matter where she is in the city, she says she is bound to run into someone she knows, from Central Square to the Charles River.

“People really love Cambridge, and they spend time here,” she said. “The depth of community is really special.”