In 1983, a Korean commercial airline, en route from Anchorage, Alaska, to Seoul, mistakenly entered the Soviet Union’s airspace. A Soviet fighter jet shot it down, killing 269 people. To minimize future navigational errors, President Ronald Reagan allowed civilian access to GPS. But that access came with a catch—to protect national security, he imposed a filter that blunted the accuracy, as compared to what was available to the military. President Bill Clinton, an advocate of using GPS for “addressing a broad range of military, civil, commercial, and scientific interests, both national and international” throughout his two terms, took away the restrictions prior to leaving office. On May 1, 2000, he ordered an end to the intentional degrading of GPS accuracy: “The decision to discontinue Selective Availability is the latest measure in an ongoing effort to make GPS more responsive to civil and commercial users worldwide ... This increase in accuracy will allow new GPS applications to emerge and continue to enhance the lives of people around the world.”

Propelled by the government’s support, more private sector entities began experimenting in this space. Those innovators began offering a variety of commercial applications. Prices for GPS chips fell dramatically, allowing phone carriers to offer navigation as an inexpensive, standard feature in products. And the GPS industry—requiring roughly $1.3 billion a year from the U.S. Treasury for procuring satellites and furthering systems development—has grown into a $65 billion enterprise. That includes an array of smartphone apps helping users find anything from an art museum to an aunt’s house.

In the mid-2000s, Dr. David Van Sickle had a more critical cause in mind. While working as a respiratory disease detective in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, he didn’t need to dig much to identify a major problem in the health care system. That was easy as breathing—breathing for him, anyway. “People think about asthma, and think we must have a handle on it in the U.S.,” Van Sickle said. “But the grim reality is that most patients’ asthma in this country is uncontrolled. There’s a higher rate of going to the hospital than there should be. We have been doing the same thing about asthma for years, and we have made basically no dent in hospitalizations. The majority of those people think they are doing fine, so no one treats them with a course correction. And, so, there’s inexcusable morbidity. There’s this really ridiculous gap between what we should be able to do and what we’ve been able to accomplish.”

In his view, this has been largely a product of information gaps on both the public health and clinical sides of the equation. During his time at the CDC, including his work examining asthma outbreaks due to mold exposure in the aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, he kept coming across the same obstacles: asthma data that was often years old and long outdated by the time he saw it; data that only accounted for deaths and hospitalizations rather than informative events such as school and work absences. Due to these limitations, research at the public health level was often done by “carpet-bombing a community” rather than targeting specific, smaller areas.

These gaps made it nearly impossible to tackle the issue in any productive, proactive, individual way. “You would never have to ask a credit card company to review data on an annual basis,” he said. “But you have to ask public health or health care to do that? This is vastly behind where other industries are.”