WHO Hub For Pandemic And Epidemic Intelligence

The World Health Organization Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence was established by the Director-General of the World Health Organization and the former Chancellor of Germany in 2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Pandemic Hub is led by Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, who is Assistant Director-General, Division of Health Emergency Intelligence and Surveillance Systems at WHO.

A new understanding of pandemic and epidemic risks

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated weaknesses around the world in how countries detect, monitor, and manage public health threats. The WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence (hereafter, Pandemic Hub) will support countries, regional and global actors to address future pandemic and epidemic risks with better access to data, better analytical capacities, and better tools and insights for decision making. The Pandemic Hub is embedded in WHO's Health Emergencies Programme and is based in Berlin, Germany. Building on expertise across disciplines, sectors, and regions, the Pandemic Hub will leverage WHO's convening power to foster global solutions built on an architecture of global collaboration and trust. A Pandemic Hub for the world in Berlin.

Based in Berlin. Connecting the world.

With a presence in more than 150 countries, six Regional Offices, and its Geneva headquarters, WHO's reach gives us the ability to treat pandemic, epidemic, and public health risks with equal urgency and diligence everywhere. Political and financial support from the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany sets a strong foundation for the Hub, and Berlin offers a vibrant research, science, education, innovation, and civil society ecosystem that will enable its development.

By linking local, regional, and global initiatives, the Pandemic Hub fosters a collaborative environment for innovators, scientists and experts from across a wide spectrum of disciplines, allowing us to leverage and share cutting-edge technology and anchoring our work in the needs of stakeholders around the world.

The Pandemic Hub's activities fall into three main categories:  

Connect

→  Create a multi-disciplinary collaborative intelligence environment: The Pandemic Hub will build trust-based collaborations for pandemic and epidemic intelligence through surveillance systems and data from across sectors and disciplines, beginning with national public health institutes and professional communities of practice. It will enable collaborations between all countries and across all sectors.

→   Build a global system to connect data from a wide range of sources: The Pandemic Hub will lead the development of a global system to improve the detection, assessment, and management of pandemic and epidemic risks. It will guide stakeholders on how to define, design, and maintain systems that allow for better availability, wider accessibility, and easier usability of different types of data. The global trust architecture will ensure that data remains with their primary custodians. 

Innovate

→  Facilitate the development and wide availability of robust analytic tools: The Pandemic Hub will build open processes that facilitate experimentation, testing, and scaling of innovations in data analytics and modelling. It will enable communities at local, national, regional, and global levels to strengthen decision making through innovative tools and applications.

→  Drive a global agenda for responsible research and development in pandemic and epidemic intelligence: The Pandemic Hub will lead a process to establish priorities for surveillance and pandemic and epidemic intelligence tools, approaches, and applications. This research and development agenda will focus on priorities for academic institutions and funders. Alongside public health institutions, it will facilitate the translation of research into practice and promote ongoing evaluation of these priorities.

Strengthen

→  Provide advisory, training, and capacity-building services: The Pandemic Hub will provide technical guidance and training to help establish or strengthen countries’ pandemic and epidemic intelligence capacities. This will include guidance on data collection and harmonisation, and sharing standards in new areas, such as genomics. The Pandemic Hub will work closely with national public health institutes and other partners to scale up efforts.

→  Support timely, effective decision making and policies: The Pandemic Hub will foster the sharing of insights and collaborative problem solving to enable better decision making based on trust and data solidarity.

Initiatives started or accelerated

Since September 2021, the Pandemic Hub has begun to systematically build a portfolio of projects to accelerate existing efforts and develop new activities. These are initial activities in their early phases:

→  Community-building:
EIOS (the Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources initiative)
' – an ongoing WHO-led initiative through which the Pandemic Hub offers integrated solutions to a growing collaborative global community focused on all-hazards public health intelligence.

→  Linking data: ''Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR²)'' – a project that explores new ways of connecting information and concepts to make relationships in data more visible and increase analytical power that will result in deeper insights.

→  Aligning global efforts: ''International Pathogen Surveillance Network (IPSN)'' – a WHO-led initiative to address the gaps and needs in local-to-global genomic surveillance for timely and appropriate public health actions for pathogens with pandemic potential.

→  Linking communities of practice: ''Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence Innovation Forum'' – started in February 2022, this series of engagements fosters alignment between actors in pandemic and epidemic intelligence.

→  Experimentation and testing: ''Collaboratory'' - A virtual and physical space created in the Pandemic Hub for developing and nurturing innovations in data analytics while linking communities of practice across the WHO Health Emergencies Programme to innovators.

→  Guiding innovation: ''Research and development agenda'' – Establishing global research priorities and translation mechanisms for pandemic and epidemic intelligence.

→  Skills building:  ''PHI competencies'' – an ongoing effort to design and promote pandemic and epidemic intelligence training.

Main outcomes

The Pandemic Hub increases the world's capacity to do better surveillance, gather better data that results in better analysis, and uses collaborative intelligence to help leaders make better decisions.

Better data

New methods are needed to sift through ever-increasing volumes of data, analyse and synthesize them. Further, data gathered by organizations and Member States can be difficult to share and may be constrained by considerations of confidentiality and privacy, with often limited access. Fundamental barriers include a lack of common standards and streamlined processes and a wide range of languages and applications used to collect the data. Even when shared, data are often delayed, partial, static, and subject to restrictions, or in need of time-consuming clean-up, translation, and transformation. These challenges highlight the urgent need for a global data architecture and governance mechanism to facilitate rapid and efficient data and information sharing from countries and organizations spanning the public, private, and academic sectors. The creation of an evolving data and application ecosystem for pandemic and epidemic intelligence requires common standards for metadata and interoperability.

Better analytics

Effective, evidence-driven public health action requires robust analyses that use comprehensive and contextualized data. But the current landscape is incoherent: tools are often developed in isolation or on an ad hoc basis, analyses are hampered by various data issues, and communities of practice are often fragmented or narrowly focused rather than collaboratively feeding into and building on each other's results and insights. Incentives are often not aligned and may reflect immediate or narrow purposes.

The Pandemic Hub will help Member States and organizations use a new pandemic and epidemic intelligence global data architecture to inform policy and action. This data architecture will be based on semantically linked data, collaborative development of analytic tools, and the translation of analyses into usable insights.

Better decisions

The goal of better pandemic and epidemic intelligence is to improve decision making for public health, which involves many stakeholders with different capacities. The Pandemic Hub will harness methods and tools from the decision sciences to ensure that insights lead to demand-driven and tailored decisions that meet contextual needs.

The Pandemic Hub will work with communities of practice at local, regional, and global levels to prioritize their needs, address gaps, and scale up and accelerate the adoption of new pandemic and epidemic intelligence solutions.

See also

* Scientific Advisory Group for Origins of Novel Pathogens
* Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response

References

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World Health Organization
Public health
Health policy
Organizations established for the COVID-19 pandemic
International responses to the COVID-19 pandemic
Scientific and technical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic