Global Health Security

Project Overview

The Global Health Security (GHS) team works on improving public health responses to COVID-19 and new emerging infectious diseases worldwide.

Prevention Response for Outbreaks, Threats, and Emergencies through Capacitation and Training (PROTECT) is a five-year project funded by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It is designed to improve public health responses to COVID-19 and new emerging infectious diseases in South America (SAM) and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions. PROTECT strengthens several aspects of global health security, including event-based surveillance, respiratory surveillance and cross-border surveillance, as well as One Health and water-borne surveillance.

Areas of Support

The informatics team supports the GHS and PROTECT initiatives through these main areas:

  • Supporting Data Systems — development of advanced data and analytics systems for consolidating and analyzing large volumes of data, ensuring accurate, up-to-date data for health officials
  • Data Integration — integration of metagenomic, wastewater, clinical, and epidemiological data into single data repositories
  • Workshops and Trainings — provide trainings, hackathons, ongoing technical assistance, and curriculum development in the area of data analytics, visualization and systems maintenance

Accomplishments

Event-based Surveillance Systems

  • Built an ODK-based Event-Based Surveillance system in Paraguay, which features online/offline capabilities with data capture through smartphones, as well as automated notifications through each of the four steps of EBS (identification, verification,triage, risk assessment)
  • Redesigned and rebuilt Egypt’s EBS system with a custom ASP.NET MVC built solution in collaboration with the Egyptian Ministry of Health & Population incorporating unique requirements such as push notifications, security and usability
  • Upgraded and restored the Jordanian EBS system called JIERS (Jordan Integrated Electronic Records System) with the Jordan Ministry of Health

Vector-Borne Disease System in Egypt

  • Currently working on a DHIS2-based data collection system for Egypt’s vector-borne disease prevention and control program
  • Introducing a modular data collection platform to ultimately streamline future One Health data capture and eventual integration within and across Ministries

Trainings in R, EBS, Data Warehousing and Data Visualization

  • Conducted three PowerBI trainings focused on public health surveillance in Egypt and Jordan, in collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
  • Generated a report on cross-border health and a short-course series of learning modules.
  • Provided trainings for data analytics with R and data visualization with Power BI using EBS data
  • Deployed workforce trainings for EBS sensitization in Morocco & Paraguay, as well as developing electronic EBS training modules in multiple languages
  • Provided various trainings to support Jordan’s National Public Health Institute, JCDC, in creating a cross-ministry One Health warehouse. Trainings covering data warehousing architecture, ETL, data models, and, later, PowerBI to visualize  One Health indicators
  • Created a comprehensive PowerBI user guide elaborating creation of charts, maps, filters, custom visuals and role-based security

Key Leadership

UCSF

  • Principal Investigator: George Rutherford, MD, MA
  • Leadership Team: Fitti Weissglas - Director of Health Informatics, David Mugume - HIS Team Lead, Michelle Moghadassi - HIS Program Manager