Surveillance is a fundamental component of mounting a public health response to any disease outbreak. The Surveillance and Epidemiology Hub of the USF Pandemic Response Research Network™ (PRRN) brings exceptional research skills to addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.
Surveillance activities, which include identifying, tracing, isolating and testing, ideally should be done with multidisciplinary teams that can also plan and execute intervention studies and prevention strategies. We are working with the other PRRN hubs to plan and execute clinical trials and therapeutic studies, employing traditional epidemiological techniques.
Equally important are the skills needed to track and predict the impact of pandemics through sophisticated data analytics, which is another element of the Surveillance and Epidemiology Hub of the PRRN. These techniques allow researchers to forecast both health care costs and diseases patterns over time — essential data that help us with pandemic projections.
Preliminary research areas will focus on:
- Surveillance – Utilizing these methods to track:
- Number of cases
- Impact of an intervention
- Establish priorities for interventions
- Level of immunity in communities
- Data analytics – Utilizing these methods to:
- Predict the impact of the epidemic
- Track patterns of symptoms and disease in a specified space and time
- Inform policy to promote population health
- Forecast health care needs
- Predict costs and utilization of health care resources
- Standardized epidemiological techniques – Utilizing these methods to help:
- Design clinical trials
- Assess impact of therapeutics
- Establish parameters for vaccine trials
Hub Coordinators: Ellen Daley, College of Public Health; Kevin Kip, College of Public Health
Research Cluster Areas:
- Biosensors
- Data Mining / Data Analytics
- Genomics
- Health Impact
- Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence
- Modeling