Partnerships

The Georgia Department of Public Health (GDPH) leads efforts to prevent disease, injury, and disability; promote health and well-being; and prepare for and respond to health emergencies across the state. Working closely with county health departments and public health districts, GDPH protects lives through programs in health promotion, disease prevention, maternal and child health, environmental health, infectious disease control, immunizations, epidemiology, and vital records.   

CIDMATH builds on Emory’s long-standing collaboration with GDPH, strengthening data sharing, staffing, and joint research efforts. Through this partnership, CIDMATH’s modeling core analyzes data provided by GDPH to study both routine and emergency public health challenges. Collaborations happen at multiple levels, from technical working groups with GDPH experts to regular meetings with senior leadership. CIDMATH supports GDPH through surge staffing plans, exploration of high-quality data sources, innovative analytic products, and the training of early public health professionals.  

Kaiser Permanente of Georgia (KPGA) is the state’s region of Kaiser Permanente, a leading health insurance provider dedicated to delivering coordinated, patient-centered care.  KPGA is Georgia’s top-rated health plan and leads the state in 51 measures of care effectiveness, reflecting its commitment to quality and innovation, and improving health outcomes across the communities it serves. The Center for Research and Evaluation (CRE) at KPGA consists of multidisciplinary team members that work to conduct and disseminate research that positively impacts health outcomes, improves service delivery, and reduces health disparities.

CIDMATH and KPGA CRE work together to connect clinical data with innovative modelling methods. This collaboration powers two of CIDMATH’s ongoing studies. The ENGAGED study provides insights into how illness and interventions such as vaccination affect daily interactions through the evaluation of regularly disseminated social contact surveys of KPGA members, linked to their electronic health records. Our vaccine evaluation team works with KPGA to apply new methodologies testing vaccine effectiveness in real-world settings.  

The Emerging Infections Program is a national network of 12 sites, working with CDC and FDA, that supports state-level efforts to track, prevent, and report on emerging infectious diseases. In Georgia, the EIP is a collaboration between the Georgia Department of Public Health, Emory University, and the Atlanta VA Medical Center. The team conducts active surveillance and research on foodborne illnesses, invasive bacterial infections, viral respiratory pathogens, and healthcare-associated infections to provide critical data to guide public health action.  

CIDMATH works closely with Georgia EIP to refine models and explore key research questions to strengthen public health preparedness. This collaboration ensures that modeling efforts are grounded in high-quality data and support effective public health decision-making while providing training opportunities for master’s level students. EIP and CIDMATH professionals provide mentorship to graduate researchers hoping to gain experience in infectious disease analytics, data modernization and visualization through specific modelling projects that contribute EIP resources and help guide CIDMATH’s data analyses.  

WastewaterSCAN has advanced the science of wastewater-based epidemiology and simultaneously applied those insights by building a nationwide wastewater monitoring network. Based at Stanford University and run in partnership with Emory University, the program collects and analyzes samples from more than 160 treatment plants across the United States. Their innovative method of testing wastewater solids to rapidly detect disease, first developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, is currently being used at 150 sites across the country for 11 infectious diseases. WastewaterSCAN’s work has been imperative in demonstrating how public health agencies can use wastewater data to effectively track infectious diseases and better protect public health 

CIDMATH has access to data from eight WastewaterSCAN sites in Georgia, as well as stored samples from sites across the country. Using this data, CIDMATH’s wastewater team is creating new tools to better understand infectious disease signals in wastewater and apply them to disease modeling. The team is also developing machine learning methods to forecast outbreaks, strengthening our ability to provide real-time estimates of how disease spread.