From January to October of this year, the Health Impacts Core (HIC) team has been working with NACCHO to provide technical assistance and guidance to fifteen local health departments on disease forecasting and modeling. The HIC team met with the local health departments to offer monthly technical assistance, deep insights into how disease modeling and forecasting work, and how to overcome some of the many challenges of working with small, incomplete, or inconsistent data. Many health departments are turning to these techniques to help inform decisions on preventing the spread of diseases. In addition to the technical assistance, the HIC, in partnership with NACCHO and the CDC Center for Disease Forecasting, created a data-driven tabletop exercise, giving the participating health departments hands-on experience working with different types of data, using back-of-the-envelope skills and providing recommendations on how to stop the spread of a respiratory disease outbreak. In March, the HIC team traveled to Cleveland, OH, to facilitate the tabletop exercise as a precursor to the NACCHO Preparedness Summit. And be on the lookout for the forthcoming quick guides on how to familiarize yourself with disease forecasting and modeling and recommended training for learning more.

One of the participating health departments wrote about their experience in this program and the skills their team developed. More importantly, all the teams came away with a better understanding of establishing partnerships with other agencies and universities to collaborate on capturing better data and building more robust insights into keeping the people in their communities healthy and safe.