Epidemiology & Surveillance
Goldbelt Professional Services provides Epidemiology and Surveillance support to aid the Department of Health and Human Services in protecting the health and safety of our nation. Our epidemiologists and data analysts have provided critical support to several divisions within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) amid the COVID-19 pandemic and continue to provide support studying other infectious communicable diseases with potentially global impacts.
COVID-19 and Respiratory Disease Epidemiology Support for NCIRD
The CDC National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) plays a critical role in outbreak response, diagnostic epidemiology, vaccine development, and control of respiratory and vaccine-preventable disease nationally and globally including COVID-19. Goldbelt provides support to NCIRD in implementation of scientific and programmatic activities to better understand and combat COVID-19 including transmission dynamics, risk factors for mortality, prevention strategies, understanding of vaccine development, distribution chains, multicenter data feeds and data-driven decision making.
We provide infectious disease epidemiology support and data analysis for the Community Surveillance for Infection Response, FluTES-C expansion, and pandemic cohorts. We provide epidemiological support on multi-site epidemiologic studies. This includes using advanced statistical programming (SAS and R) to collect data from multiple project site locations, cleaning data, validating the data, analyzing the data using advanced epidemiologic methods (e.g., regression models), summarizing results, and writing scientific manuscripts. We serve as the surveillance focal point for the ITF and provide technical assistance in the conversion of existing CDC funded platforms for acute febrile illness, polio, and respiratory viruses into a cohesive global surveillance system that feeds into World Health Organization (WHO) GISRS and helps guide global response. We support the coordination of the global surveillance networks to provide actionable COVID data for USG response.
COVID-19 Pandemic Support for NCEZID DHQP
Goldbelt provides epidemiology support to the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID) Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion (DHQP). The mission of DHQP is to protect patients; protect healthcare personnel; and promote safety, quality, and value in both national and international healthcare delivery systems. To support this mission, Goldbelt epidemiologists support the Surveillance Branch (SB) in conducting surveillance, research, and demonstration projects to measure the impact of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), adverse drug events, and other complications of healthcare.
Our epidemiologists collaborate with CDC staff to monitor the implementation of infection prevention and control activities to prevent the spread of COVID-19 within long-term care facilities. We develop infection prevention and control guidance, training materials, and monitoring and evaluation tools as well as provide training, technical assistance, and user support to health facilities responding to and recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. We develop strategies to improve the collection, analysis, and use of infection prevention and control process and outcome data for COVID-19. Based on finding, our team prepares data summaries, feedback reports, and presentations. We provide recommendations for using data for action and assist DHQP SME’s with the development and implementation of work plans and work with partners accomplish public health surveillance and other program goals.
COVID-19 State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Pandemic Support
Goldbelt is supporting the CDC’s State, Tribal, Local and Territorial (STLT) Support Section, one of several critical task forces that comprise CDC’s Incident Management Structure. Its mission is to provide support STLT jurisdictions to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 and improve response operations.
Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, our team provided critical data collection and analysis to the STLT Task Force to analyze hotspots and outbreaks amid the pandemic to better understand and slow the spread of the virus. This involved conferring with research staff in developing and administering surveys, analyzing results, and preparing summaries of findings. We continue to provide expertise in information modeling and requirement analysis and write methods and results as part of manuscript development to communicate important findings to the scientific community as well as to the public.
Our epidemiologists are tasked with maintaining quality control of the data the team collects and analyzes along with the information our team puts out. Our team is responsible for ensuring the completeness and quality of all data entry. Our team recommends changes to analytic or epidemiologic approaches to ensure quality outcomes, as necessary.
Poxvirus and Rabies Epidemiology Support
We support NCEZID’s Poxvirus and Rabies Branch (PRB), which serves as lead technical advisors to both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE). PRB provides leadership, direction, and guidance for epidemic aid, surveillance, and epidemiologic and/or ecologic investigations of poxvirus and rabies virus-associated diseases both domestically and internationally.
We provide support to the PRB’s Epidemiology Team. Goldbelt aids in international rabies surveillance system design, including development of databases for collection of human and animal rabies information. Our team also monitors domestic international rabies databases, ensuring that data is entered in a timely fashion and conducting data quality assessments. We also monitor human rabies records and participate in a working group to ensure that human rabies data is appropriately recorded and electronically stored. We analyze data associated with epidemiologic studies and present work at national/international conferences and prepare manuscripts for publication.