Across the country, cities, counties, and states, officials have worked with academic modeling teams to develop custom models to predict diseases that could and would happen in their jurisdictions.
The problem has been that municipalities have not had the resources to develop models specific to their locations and were forced to extrapolate data from other models and make important decisions based on less than ideal information.
Joe Mihaljevic, a disease ecologist was awarded $3.5 million by NIH https://www.nih.gov to take modeling to the next level, by using the Epidemiological Modeling Resources for Public Health (EpiMoRPH) at Northern Arizona University’s (NAU) https://nau.edu School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS). He reports. “We will now be able to substantially automate and expedite the development of epidemiological models.”
With an increased emphasis on disease modeling, the EpiMoRPH platform could potentially be adopted as a national hub. Academic labs and national organizations are racing to make epidemic modeling more accessible, more useful, and more accurate.
Arizona State University will assist with mobilizing and coordinating a Public Health Advisory Council (PHAC). The PHAC will include 15 local regional and national stakeholders in public health and epidemiological modeling who will provide critical input and evaluation on the system as it is being developed. Also, collaborators from the Arizona Department of Health Services will be part of the effort
PHAC will work closely with the Advisory Council to evaluate and refine technologies, to ensure that that innovations will meet the evolving needs of public health partners, while also appealing to the community of epidemiological modelers.
Two undergraduate researchers in public health will assist the team to conduct formal evaluations of the technology and develop outreach methods with the PHAC. According to Joe Mihaljevic, “Eventually as models become more and more accurate, forecasting outbreaks could become as routine and as reliable as forecasting the weather.”