A planning committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will conduct a series of public workshops to examine the use of data to support situational awareness for medical and public health preparedness and response.

The workshop series will examine how medical, public health, emergency management, and critical infrastructure data are collected, integrated, analyzed, and translated into real-time situational awareness to support timely, coordinated decision-making across jurisdictions and sectors. The workshop series will consider these issues in the periods before, during, and after disasters and emergencies. The public workshop series will feature invited presentations and discussions that explore areas such as:

• Lessons learned from the use of data and analytic tools to support situational awareness during recent disasters and emergencies, including how systems developed for routine operations performed in emergency response;
• Current data sources, data flows, and system architectures used to support situational awareness across public health, healthcare, emergency management, and infrastructure sectors;
• Challenges and limitations related to data ownership/governance, privacy and sharing, availability, timeliness relative to decision-making needs, quality, interoperability, and analytic capacity that affect situational awareness;
• Approaches, tools, and methods for integrating, analyzing, visualizing, and communicating data, including how data and information are delivered within decision-making workflows for both routine operations and emergency response, to support operational and strategic decision-making during disasters and emergencies;
• Decision-maker information needs for situational awareness at local, state, tribal, territorial, and federal levels, and how these needs evolve across phases of preparedness, response, and recovery; and
• Potential paths forward for strengthening data-driven situational awareness to support medical and public health preparedness and response.

The planning committee will define the specific topics to be addressed, develop the workshop agendas, and select and invite speakers and other participants. Following the workshop series, a single proceedings-in-brief will be prepared by designated rapporteurs in accordance with National Academies’ guidelines and released to the public.