On November 14, 2022, the RESUME team hosted the first stakeholder visioning workshop at the University of Chicago. In addition to hosting the entire RESUME research team from institutions across the country, we welcomed nearly 20 public health officials from the CDC, California, Illinois, Cook County, and Chicago to generate an initial shared vision for how next–generation data, modeling, and decision support capabilities might significantly improve current pandemic prevention, predictive intelligence, and response.
We began the workshop with a backcasting exercise, asking stakeholders to imagine a vastly improved response to a pandemic 10 years hence and to describe the new science–enabled capabilities that made the response possible. We next asked public health departments to describe the current data sources they use for decision–making and the decision–making processes created during the COVID–19 pandemic. Then, we conducted a series of exercises to determine the gaps between the future vision and current capabilities, identifying which gaps can be addressed by the RESUME team through the planned pilot studies during the RESUME center planning grant phase.
Following the workshop, we synthesized the key themes and action items from the engagement exercises to inform the scope of the to–be–proposed RESUME center. We will be holding a follow-up visioning workshop to further engage with stakeholders on research progress and future directions.
