Better data. Better analytics. Better decisions.
The World Health Organization (WHO) Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence is working towards a world where collaborative surveillance empowers countries and communities to minimise the impact of pandemic and epidemic threats. Collaborative surveillance, a key concept within WHO’s framework to strengthen the global architecture for health emergency prevention, preparedness, response and resilience (HEPR), facilitates the systematic strengthening of capacity and collaboration among diverse stakeholders globally, both within and beyond the health sector, to enhance public health intelligence and improve evidence for decision-making.
With the support of the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany, the WHO Hub was established in September 2021 in Berlin, as part of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme. It was set up to respond to the demonstrated weaknesses around the world in how countries detect, monitor, and manage public health threats and to inform decision-making on broader policy issues to mitigate these threats.
The WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence works closely with Member States, WHO regional and country offices. With a presence in more than 150 countries, 6 regional offices, and its Geneva headquarters, the global scope of WHO allows for the ability to treat pandemic, epidemic, and public health risks with urgency and diligence around the globe.
By linking local, regional, and global initiatives, the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence 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.
Building on expertise across disciplines, sectors, and regions, the Hub leverages WHO’s convening power to foster global solutions built on an architecture of global collaboration and trust. It is committed to catalysing transformation in collaborative surveillance across all levels and serving countries by connecting, innovating, and strengthening capabilities to produce better data, analytics, and decisions.
The WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence
Prinzessinnenstrasse 17-18
10969 Berlin, Germany
E-mail: [email protected]
Since September 2021, the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence has begun to systematically build a portfolio of projects to accelerate existing efforts and develop new activities.
The following are some highlights of our work:
Collaborative Surveillance Implementation
The WHO Hub connects stakeholders from diverse sectors to establish a shared vision for collaborative surveillance that countries can implement with adequate technical and financial support. We are driving progress by developing a framework for collaborative surveillance, establishing information-sharing platforms, and identifying research and funding opportunities.
The WHO Hub has transitioned from leading the conceptual development of collaborative surveillance to promoting its global implementation.
Implementing collaborative surveillance plans at the national and regional levels is a top priority, and work is already under way in South-east Asia and Africa. In October 2023, the WHO Hub held a technical workshop to support tool development with the WHO Regional Office for South-East Asia. In November 2023, the team co-facilitated the Zambia Integrated and Collaborative Disease Surveillance Workshop and Leadership Forum to help shape a three-year project for strengthening surveillance capacities.
Similar partner-supported efforts to pilot collaborative surveillance implementation are under way in Ethiopia, Mozambique and Nigeria.
Strengthening National Public Health Agencies (NPHAs)
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for stronger coordination for health emergency preparedness and response. The WHO Hub on behalf of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme is working to strengthen NPHAs for health emergency preparedness and response.
In 2023, the WHO Health Emergencies Programme set out to strengthen countries’ ability to prevent, rapidly detect, respond to and recover from any health emergency crisis. The Programme held a consultation in 2023 with NPHA representatives from WHO Member States and experts from regional health agencies and partner organizations to identify priority areas to take forward.
The WHO Hub is supporting the Health Emergencies Programme in delivering on a number of these areas, including defining the core emergency preparedness and response functions, documenting NPHA governance models, facilitating peer-to-peer learning opportunities, and more.
Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources (EIOS)
An ongoing WHO-led initiative through which the WHO Hub offers state-of-the-art technology and integrated solutions to a growing global community, collaborating on all-hazards One Health public health intelligence.
The EIOS initiative provides Member States and partner organizations with a suite of integrated services for early detection, assessment and rapid response to public health threats.
EIOS expanded its user communities globally, with 34 Member States and 3 organizations joining in 2023, bringing the total number of users to 85 Member States and more than 20 organizations and networks. The team provided a total of 68 training workshops in 45 countries and organizations, and trained more than 1100 users in 2023, strengthening early detection of public health threats.
International Pathogen Surveillance Network (IPSN)
A global network of pathogen genomic surveillance actors with global coverage, that supports the development of faster and better national policy responses, medical countermeasures and evidence-based prevention, intervention and treatment.
Genomic sequencing is a proven method of detecting new pathogens quickly, but many regions lack the tools necessary for effective genomic surveillance. The IPSN addresses these disparities by connecting countries, regions and disease-specific networks to solve common challenges in pathogen genomics collaboratively.
Launched in May during the week of the seventy-sixth World Health Assembly, the IPSN brings together experts from governments, philanthropic foundations, multilateral organizations, civil society and academia working to build capacity for genomics and analytics in national surveillance systems. The Network currently includes 94 partner organizations across 43 countries. In 2023, it secured US$ 4 million in financing for a catalytic grants fund.
Decision-Support Simulator for Pandemic and Epidemic Interventions
Many global policy-makers lack accessible tools to evaluate the collective effect of various public health measures during emergencies. The WHO Hub is working on a tool that will conduct real-world simulations to help discern the optimal set of interventions to prevent and mitigate disease outbreaks, which will inform better health responses.
In 2023, we produced a blueprint, a partner outreach strategy and an investment case for the simulator. In 2024, the WHO Hub will identify funding and technology partners and start developing the first version of the simulator.
Open Source Programme Office (OSPO)
An initiative within the WHO Hub to support WHO as well as stakeholders from Member States, partners and academia to collaboratively develop sustainable, innovative, and impactful open source solutions for pandemic and epidemic intelligence.
Launched in June 2023, the OSPO tackles digital health fragmentation through collaboration, with a mission to provide decision-makers, health professionals and civil society actors with high-quality, co-developed and openly accessible essential tools and knowledge for informed public health decisions.
In 2023, the OSPO began hosting webinars on open source concepts and platforms to encourage collaboration among global experts in software, data science and AI. It also started hosting exchange events with open source contributor communities, with a focus on developing open source models for more effective and sustainable inter-institutional collaboration and open innovation.
The WHO Hub’s OSPO will continue to serve as a leader for other organizations by sharing the benefits of the open source model of collaboration.
Collaboratory
The Collaboratory is a digital hub where experts from across the globe unite to tackle health challenges. This platform is an interactive knowledge-sharing space where members can work together to produce timely, effective and actionable insights for use by the wider public health community.
Through workshops and hackathons, the Collaboratory convened data modellers, public health officials, academics and others to address global challenges.
The Collaboratory achieved important milestones in 2023 by establishing a Technical Advisory Group, formalizing a key partnership with the data.org platform, and convening its communities of practice.
Research Priorities for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence
A collaborative exercise to establish global research priorities for pandemic and epidemic intelligence. The WHO Hub aims to increase global strategic coherence and alignment around topic areas of importance for researchers, funders, and implementers so that better investment decisions can be made, and greater impact achieved.
The establishment of an evidence-base for collaborative surveillance has been ad hoc. The ecosystem for the development of methods, tools, and implementation approaches currently has limited strategic coherence, and insufficient attention has been given to translational efforts to implement research outputs and to conducting robust evaluations of impact. Without an evidence-base, there is potential for negative impacts on public health surveillance due to further fragmentation, technological debt, and large opportunity costs.
The WHO Hub led a global consultation process to define the global research priorities for collaborative surveillance, in close cooperation with Wellcome Trust, the Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness (GloPID-R), the Charité University Hospital, and the WHO Science Division. A technical brief on the outcome of the research prioritization exercise was published on 23 May 2024 and is accessible online:
Strengthening Public Health Intelligence (PHI) Competencies
Developing and sustaining PHI capacity requires people with these professional competencies. As the PHI community grows and evolves, training and capacity building for a unified all-hazards, One Health approach are essential.
In 2023, the WHO Hub created a comprehensive PHI landscape analysis report, developed a draft competency framework and curriculum, and established a dedicated working group to guide future training efforts.
We also defined PHI learning profiles to facilitate customized training programmes. Partnerships with key stakeholders such as TEPHINET, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and RKI furthered our goal of building strong PHI workforces.
Our dedication to strengthening PHI capacity extends beyond global levels. In 2023, we engaged closely with various partners in the field, fostering collaboration to fortify PHI capacity at the global, national and subnational levels. Through these multifaceted efforts, we are not only shaping the present landscape but also laying a robust foundation for an agile and adaptive response to future health challenges.
Data Science for Public Health Intelligence (PHI)
PHI analysts follow complex workflows involving the interpretation, summarization, and assessment of diverse information streams. Data-science projects support PHI analysts via automated data processing and analysis. This includes the development and integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning applications in PHI tools and strategic initiatives around modern AI technologies.
Together with partners, the WHO Hub works on improving the relevance, for individual communities, of the screening of online information via PHI tools such as the EIOS; developing modules to detect and summarize currently relevant topics; improving the semantic search of online sources; and more.
Beside these innovative software-development activities, we also work on strategic and guidance documents for responsible research in the use of AI for PHI, including the development of large AI models for public health.