A system to Predict and Analyze Novel and emerging Diseases Enabled by Models of Infection Conditions (PANDEMIC)

Incidences of infectious disease pose serious threats to armed forces worldwide, risking the success of critical operations and the deaths of Warfighters. Approaches exist to reduce severity of disease impact to operational forces by detecting, monitoring, and treating infected personnel after exposure, but this does not effectively maintain and sustain force health. Force medical personnel need support to predict and analyze the risk a particular disease will present in an area of operations (AO) to inform decision makers. To provide this support, we conducted a Phase I effort to demonstrate a system to Predict and Analyze Novel and emerging Diseases Enabled by Models of Infection Conditions (PANDEMIC). Based on our success, we propose a Phase II effort to develop and evaluate PANDEMIC. PANDEMIC provides disease outbreak prediction support via four key components: (1) a library of individual infectious disease conditions; (2) model development and management capabilities that define relevant conditions and refine their underlying conditional probabilities to match novel AOs; (3) visualization support aids that foster appropriate trust in a disease models results, enabling users to review predictions based on relevant contextual data; and (4) a mitigation prioritization tool enabling users to compare preventative strategies and their anticipated impact.