2014.ISDS.Abstracts.Final.pdf


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ISDS 2014 Conference Abstracts

Advancing Epidemic Prediction and Forecasting: A New 
US Government Initiative 
Jean-Paul Chretien*1, David Swedlow2, Irene Eckstrand3, Dylan George4, Michael 
Johansson2, Robert Huffman5 and Andrew Hebbeler6

1Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, Silver Spring, MD, USA; 2Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, USA; 
3National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA; 4Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, Washington, DC, 
USA; 5Department of Defense, Ft. Belvoir, VA, USA; 6Office of Science and Technology Policy, Washington, DC, USA

Objective
To accelerate the development of US federal infectious disease 

outbreak prediction (i.e., identification of future time and place of a 
disease event) and forecasting (i.e., disease spread) capabilities.

Introduction
The National Science and Technology Council, within the 

Executive Office of the President, established the Pandemic Prediction 
and Forecasting Science and Technology (PPFST) Working Group 
in 2013. The PPFST Working Group supports the US Predict the 
Next Pandemic Initiative, and serves as a forum to accelerate the 
development of federal infectious disease outbreak prediction and 
forecasting capabilities. Priorities include identification, evaluation, 
and integration of disparate biosurveillance and other data streams for 
prediction/forecasting; characterization of the decision context for US 
Government use of prediction/forecasting models; and development 
of a common US Government vision for federal prediction/forecasting 
capabilities. The Working Group comprises 18 federal departments 
and agencies, as well as the National Security Council, Office of 
Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and Office of Management 
and Budget. OSTP, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 
and the Department of Defense chair the Working Group.

Methods
In 2014, the Working Group initiated a pilot project, “Integrating 

Prediction and Forecasting Models for Decision-Making: Dengue 
Epidemic Prediction”, to demonstrate the practical application of 
prediction and forecasting models. The first stage of the pilot project 
was a White House workshop in September 2014 including PPFST 
Working Group members and leading US and international experts in 
dengue surveillance, public health decision-making, and modelling. 
The goal of the workshop was to initiate a dengue prediction and 
forecasting effort using existing dengue surveillance and predictor 
data. A second workshop, in 2015, will evaluate model performance 
against datasets assembled and provided to modeling teams following 
the first workshop.

Results
Workshop participants considered public health and national 

security objectives for dengue epidemiological modelling, promising 
dengue models, and existing dengue surveillance datasets and other 
data (e.g., climatological) that could inform models. They developed 
a plan for evaluating the performance of the various models that will 
be applied to the data.

Conclusions
Through the initial dengue workshop, the PPFST Working Group 

identified data and models for the dengue pilot project, as well as 
technical and organizational needs for dengue prediction/forecasting. 
The Working Group believes that much of this knowledge also could 
be applied to future prediction/forecasting efforts for other pathogens. 

PPFST Working Group leaders will present workshop outcomes, 
and seek feedback on the Working Group’s direction from the ISDS 
community.

Keywords
Prediction; Forecasting; Federal

Acknowledgments

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily 
represent the views of any part of the US Government.

*Jean-Paul Chretien
E-mail: jpchretien@gmail.com    

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * 7(1):e13, 2015