Building in-house capabilities in health agencies and outsourcing to academia or industry: Considerations for effective infectious disease modelling.

Abstract

Infectious disease models provide a systematic way to estimate crucial features of epidemic dynamics and explore different transmission and control scenarios. Given the importance of model-based analysis in managing public health crises, there has been an increase in post-pandemic creation of both academia-driven modelling centres, hubs and consortiums and government-driven public health agencies with in-house modelling units or teams. However, in the past, the delineation of roles and responsibilities between government- and academia-led modelling groups has often been unclear. Who should perform which tasks and when? This ambiguity can increase the risk of duplicated work or unaddressed gaps in analysis. It also raises questions about the sustainability of modelling capacity for addressing routine operational analytical needs while also developing new approaches that can be tailored for emergencies. In the sections below, we discuss factors that could inform decisions about where to locate infectious disease modelling activity. Rather than giving a fixed set of rules, we outlined key considerations and trade-offs that could be taken into account to enable academic and government modelling activities to complement each other effectively, which can in turn be refined as new public health crises emerge in future.