Project Details
Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE)
Advanced analytic and visualization products, such as stand-alone modeling, forecasting, and statistical packages, are important tools that can be leveraged by public health practitioners to inform planning and decision-making, especially during infectious disease outbreaks and other public health responses. Their development and use have rapidly grown in recent years. Recognizing the need to bring the public health and modeling/forecasting community together to enhance collaboration and application of these tools, in 2017, CSTE formed a workgroup comprised of state and local public health partners and academic and private industry groups in collaboration with CDC.
This project aims to develop partnerships with STLT health departments, and academic and private industry groups to iteratively develop, test, evaluate, modify, and scale products to be used to support decision-making during infectious disease outbreaks. These products can include forecasting, analytics, or visualization tools. Through this project, we plan to focus on a selection of analytical tools we have developed during the COVID-19 response and deploy them in collaboration with the Virginia Department of Health. Considering the recurring need for such systems and the lightweight nature of our existing tools, we will focus primarily on time-series-based analytical frameworks. Once perfected, this deployment approach can be used for more complex tools such as mechanistic simulations.
Finally, we will work with a couple of health districts to pilot-test the tool deployed on their systems. Once deployed, we intend to do an initial series of workshops focused on the end users (e.g., analysts) as well as data engineers within the public health agency.