Community Engagement is the most important, yet often the most under resourced work for Local Public Health Agencies. Eagle County Public Health and Environment (ECPHE) has been exploring how AI can build department wide infrastructure to support Community Engagement work. Two use cases have been implemented at ECPHE: qualitative coding of community gathered data in Gemini and the creation of an AI toolkit in NotebookLM.
In 2023 ECPHE involved hundreds of Eagle County residents in the creation of the Public Health Improvement Plan and performed a qualitative analysis to identify key codes present in the data. This process was done manually, involving 25 staff and taking hundreds of people hours to complete. In 2025 ECPHE replicated this coding process by using a Gemini Gem to categorize community statements. The AI results were substantially similar to the results from human coding and were provided in a fraction of the time. This process is being used in ECPHE’s planning processes such as the recent Aging Well Roadmap. In 2025 ECPHE created a community engagement toolkit in NotebookLM, incorporating a community engagement model, information from the ‘Community Toolbox’ and data on Eagle County, the toolbox is being used by staff as a planning aide for Community Engagement activities. These tools are not intended to replace human relationships or the relational nature of community engagement. Rather, they are designed to strengthen this work by adding a layer of support that allows staff to better understand, organize, and act on community voice.
