Title: Electronic Data Capture to support rapid epidemiological research and response during epidemics
Funder: Department of Health and Social Care

Abstract: Responses to epidemics of infectious diseases will be more effective if the research and response community can deploy efficient systems for rapidly collecting, analysing and then disseminating data collected in the field, at the bedside, and in the laboratory. Electronic data collection (EDC) services may facilitate higher fidelity and more rapid collection and analysis of data in these settings but adequate evaluation of the optimal EDC tools and their barriers to implementation is required to facilitate wider uptake of EDC during epidemic response. We will address this knowledge gap through an innovative collaborative project involving scientists, public health responders, software developers, and affected communities drive the design and development, and the work is regularly and rigorously evaluated in real-world outbreak response. We will build on and expand an existing range of electronic data collection platforms to develop a suite of tools designed to facilitate robust data-collection and real-time analysis in the epidemic setting. We have previously demonstrated the potential for the use of such tools for use in proches des survivants, a trial of the VSV-ZEBOV vaccine in contacts of Ebola virus disease survivors. In combination our proposal will develop, validate and evaluate a combined software-hardware architecture that will provide rapidly deployable, robust tools for data-collection and analysis in during epidemic response. We will use an agile development process incorporating user-led iterative tool development in collaboration with partners at the UK Public Health Rapid Support team. In the field, we will work with the UK Public Health Rapid Support team, local communities and other partners to validate novel data collection and geospatial mapping approaches during outbreaks, including community-led approaches to data collection. We propose to iteratively evaluate these tools over the course of multiple deployments of the UK-PHRST, which provides opportunities to optimise the tools, demonstrate their robustness for use in real-world epidemic response, and generate scientific insight from data collected. Our tool suite will facilitate collection and rapid linkage of clinical, environmental, laboratory, and geospatial data into a common secure data portal. In addition to refining and validating the tools we will develop platforms to facilitate automated and real-time analysis of data. Real-time epidemic analyses have been crucial for effective public health response, demonstrated during the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic, in estimating the short and medium-term estimates for case estimates and effect of interventions. We will involve key specialists in mathematical modelling, epidemiology, and public health evaluation at all stages to make sure the platforms meet the needs of researchers. This platform will improve time to data access, decrease cost of collection, and provide research-ready datasets, which will hasten progress in mathematical modelling, public health intervention planning, and strategic decision making in response to outbreaks. Our team brings together clinicians, epidemiologists and software experts in collaboration with partner organisations including the UK Public Health Rapid Support team. This clinical-academic network makes us uniquely placed to both deliver the strategic goals of the proposal and deliver a tool suite that is fit-for-purpose in addressing the needs of epidemic response.

Lay abstract: Infectious disease outbreak emergencies require urgent intervention to prevent their effects from worsening and to limit the extent to which infection can continue to spread. Good emergency management starts with good preparedness and one of the most important things that we must be prepared for is to be able to respond rapidly, to collect huge amounts of data in a short time period, to make sense of that data and then to communicate the findings to people who need to use the data to make important decisions. At the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine we have been using Android tablets and an app called &ldquo;Open Data Kit&rdquo; (ODK) to collect data for more than 100 research studies. We believe that this and other software could be the ideal ready-to-go option for emergency response data collection. In this project we will not only make the ODK system even better than it already is, but we will add extra apps, software and protocols that will make geographical mapping much faster and which will allow us to add web-surveys and other data collection methods to the list of ways we can gather data. We also plan to automate a lot of the hard work so that data and results get where they need to be much faster. We ll provide support to all our users but we won t charge anyone for our services, so anyone can use them. We will also make all of our outputs such as papers, computer programs, methods and training materials available for free via the internet. A very important part of the work that is done in the field during outbreaks and emergencies is developing high quality maps of the affected areas. Our tools include mapping software that have been used in outbreaks before but which we believe could be used more effectively. We will test several different ways of electronic mapping. This will include crowd-sourcing of data and community involvement as we believe that everyone with a mobile phone is a potential participant in the data gathering part of the response effort.

Research activity codes: 2.5 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGIES (AETIOLOGY)
Health categories: INFECTION