Health department letters of support for CDC-RFA-FT-23-0069 application
Hello CSTE Spatial Analysis Workgroup! I’ve reached out to a few of you directly, but I’m posting here to invite additional health departments who might be interested in joining us on our CDC cooperative agreement application. We are responding to CDC-RFA-FT-23-0069 (https://www.cdc.gov/forecast-outbreak-analytics/nofo.html) on ‘Centers for Implementation of Outbreak Analytics and Disease Modeling,’ with the goal to ‘bring proven/tested approaches to scale across organizations and jurisdictions’ (Component 4). Acumen, LLC (https://www.acumenllc.com/) would be the prime applicant, with subcontracts to health departments and others. We request by the end of June please a signed Letter of Support on your health department’s letterhead, indicating whether you are additionally interested in a subcontract to also receive $100,000 per year for five years to fund someone to lead local implementation.
If you are interested in joining us on this application, or if you want to discuss in more detail, please contact me directly (sgreene4@health.nyc.gov), with no need to post back to the entire workgroup. Interested jurisdictions would contribute to a community of practice and receive our technical support to locally implement, refine, and troubleshoot selected proven outbreak analytics approaches of your choosing, such as an outbreak detection and monitoring system for reportable diseases, using space-time scan statistics in SaTScan (https://www.satscan.org/), and a system for automatically detecting foodborne illness outbreaks mentioned in restaurant reviews on social media (https://publichealth.cs.columbia.edu/). Other health departments have shown interest in locally implementing or improving similar systems in their own jurisdictions, and this funding opportunity would provide you and us with more bandwidth to do so.
Thank you for considering,
Sharon K. Greene, PhD, MPH Epidemiology and Analysis Team Lead and
HaeNa Waechter, MPH, Foodborne Disease Team Lead
Bureau of Communicable Disease, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
Luis Gravano, PhD, Professor, Computer Science Department, Columbia University
Martin Kulldorff, PhD, Acumen, LLC
I have moved back to Australia,— but remain very interested in this topic.
I strongly suspect international partners would be excluded. But just in case we are eligible, putting up my hand!!! 😊
Happy to chat if that would help.
Marion Kainer
I believe from the FAQs (https://www.cdc.gov/forecast-outbreak-analytics/nofo-faqs.html) that the focus is to enable the development of tools and solutions that work across jurisdictions and implementation environments within the United States. I don't think we can formally include letters of support from non-U.S. partners in our application, but hopefully if our application is funded, there could be a way for international partners to participate in a community of practice. We expect to learn by mid-September if we are funded, so perhaps interested international partners could please reach out to me directly (sgreene4@health.nyc.gov) toward the end of the year as plans potentially take shape.
Many thanks,
Sharon
I’m a DrPH(c) and I will defend my dissertation at the end of this month. I serve on this workgroup and I would love to be involved on this project. Any suggestions on what path should I take? I would love to get this experience added to my skill set.
We would potentially be interested, but contract work here can be complicated. We have a ESRI GIS portal and even considered applying for this funding, but did not have the time to indicate we are.
Our GIS work has been on hold as we build out a SQL datamart. This could be great timing with production database supposed to be up and running by end of July. We would like to build out auto cluster detection and email notification on clusters of communicable disease. We have done some preliminary work with cluster defining parameters but this work is in limbo until we have the production database in place.
June
June Bancroft, MPH, CIC (she/her)
Senior Laboratory and Epidemiology Capacity Epidemiologist,
Oregon Public Health Division,
Note: new email address as of March 2023 - June.E.Bancroft@oha.oregon.gov<mailto:June.E.Bancroft@oha.oregon.gov>
Phone: 971-673-1045
Cell: 503-309-6822