With the constantly expanding and overwhelming velocity, variety and volume of information available, sophisticated methods are required to help sift through it, isolate relevant and useful content, and synthesize and integrate it. At the same time, the data held by different organizations and Member States are difficult to share, bring with them constraints of confidentiality and the need to preserve privacy, and access to the data is limited by lack of time and resources. Fundamental barriers are the absence of standards and streamlined processes, and the diversity of languages and applications used to collect them. When shared, data are often delayed, partial, static, subject to restrictions and/or in need of time-consuming clean-up, translation and transformation. Collectively, these challenges highlight the urgent need for strengthened global data architecture and governance to facilitate rapid and efficient data and information sharing from countries, as well as from other organizations spanning the public, private and academic sectors. The goal of creating an evolving and growing data and application ecosystem for pandemic and epidemic intelligence requires agreed standards for metadata and interoperability.

The EPI-BRAIN initiative will steer the technology and dynamic data components of the ecosystem required to understand how these factors link together and interact. This will be driven by the development, evolution, maintenance and expansion of a semantic network of distributed data through the development of fit-for-purpose taxonomies, ontologies and related standards; establishment of a sustainable pandemic and epidemic intelligence global data architecture; and creation of semantically linked data for analytics and insights. The artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language processing and computational social science tools used to support this architecture require considerable investment in data normalization.

Show less Show more

Effective evidence-driven public health action requires robust analyses using comprehensive and contextualized data. However, the current landscape is incoherent: tools are often developed in isolation and/or on an ad hoc basis, analyses are hampered by various data issues as identified above and communities of practice are often fragmented and/or narrowly focused rather than collaboratively feeding into and building on each other’s results and insights. Incentives are often not aligned and reflect immediate or narrow purposes.

The Insights Initiative will be created to build and nurture frameworks to promote and guide the collaborative and iterative exploitation of data for actionable insights and actively nurture an evolving network of connected analytical solutions. By fostering the collaborative creation of customizable connected solutions for complex analyses, the WHO Hub will enable Member States and organizations to inform policy and action using the new pandemic and epidemic intelligence global data architecture. Insights for pandemic and epidemic intelligence will be based on: effective use of semantically linked data; collaborative development of analytic tools; and translation of analyses into usable insights. To ensure that the insights make their way into robust and trusted decisions based on diverse perspectives, the WHO Hub will harness methods and tools from the decision sciences including expert elicitation, wisdom of the crowd and forecasting approaches. To ensure that insights lead to demand-driven and tailored decisions that meet contextual needs, the WHO Hub will follow a boosting approach that enlists resources from the cognitive strengths and environment of decision-makers to boost existing competences and develop new ones.

Show less Show more

The goal of stronger pandemic and epidemic intelligence is to improve public health decision-making. Decision-making in response to pandemic and epidemic risks involves many stakeholders with different capacities. There are also structural challenges to better decision-making such as gaps in communication, infrastructure and workforce competencies. In turn, these impact adoption of solutions and tools and ultimately the longer-term development of the pandemic and epidemic intelligence ecosystem.

The Implementation Accelerator will be established to work with communities of practice at local, regional and global levels to scale up and accelerate the adoption of new pandemic and epidemic intelligence solutions. The communities of practice will also inform and prioritize future needs and gaps that need to be addressed. The Implementation Accelerator will identify how pandemic and epidemic intelligence approaches can contribute to achieve already defined public health goals, such as performance for outbreak response, managing emerging disease risks and disease control programmes.

Show less Show more