Chancellery Research - Research Publications

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The Role of Data in a Rapid and Coordinated Response to Infectious Disease Outbreaks

Pillai, P (Research Data Alliance, 2020)

How does data support preparedness towards infectious disease emergencies? What information is needed to identify the start of an outbreak? How does data inform the potential severity and spread of an outbreak? The infectious diseases data ecosystem is comprised of information from a wide range of sources like general practices, jurisdictional surveillance systems, clinical research, emergency departments, diagnostic laboratories, epidemiology studies and genomics. The carefully distilled knowledge from this diverse data ecosystem enables better preparedness for and response towards an outbreak. Past infectious disease outbreaks have demonstrated several challenges associated with rapid aggregation, integration and sharing of data to inform a response during an outbreak. It is essential to improve data collection, facilitate data sharing and support data usage for decision-making in the infectious diseases community. This keynote speech will describe the composition of the infectious disease data ecosystem and highlight some challenges from the past outbreaks associated with building the data ecosystem for a response. This speech will also describe how making data consistent and shareable has strengthened preparedness and response activities in present-day scenario.