As we see an increase in digital health efforts globally, we also see more silos and fragmentation. The WHO Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) aims to promote collaboration and empower decision makers, public health professionals, and civil society to make informed public health decisions. There is a need to collaborate with expert contributor communities to build innovative solutions, make support available through contributor communities and accelerate the development of technology.

The OSPO will be the center of competence for open source operations and strategy. It is developing strategy, guidelines and best practices to support the adoption of open source technology, application of open source licenses and building contributor communities. The OSPO will also provide advice and support to projects led by the Division of Emergency Intelligence and Surveillance Systems (WSE) as well as collaborative surveillance related projects; and advise and guide WHO and partner teams.

The OSPO will work closely with internal stakeholders to understand risks, address security concerns, align with internal procurement practices and leverage existing structures. By coordinating and collaborating with these teams, the OSPO aims to cut through the red tape for projects that want to go open source.

The Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence Innovation Forum (the Innovation Forum), provides a virtual space to thought leaders and innovators working at the intersection of public health, data science, and digital technology. In quarterly meetings, participants from around the world and from diverse sectors share their work on initiatives, tune in to discuss their work and connect with other members from the public health intelligence and surveillance community. The topics and speakers for each session are selected based on suggestions made by the participants and cover key challenges and opportunities in the field.

Initiated in February 2022, the Innovation Forum has covered diverse topics highlighting the innovative work to support the generation of insights for decision makers. These include technical discussions such as the aggregation and linkage of data as well as the integration and synthesis of diverse data – vital for making epidemic intelligence effective. On a different level, yet closely linked to the more technical discussion, the Innovation Forum” also covers investment and research priorities in the space of pandemic and epidemic intelligence which touch on genomic analysis.

A digital environment where subject experts and the epidemic and pandemic intelligence community converge to communicate, cultivate ideas and co-develop, to rapidly generate and provide community-driven solutions to address existing challenges and needs in the domain of data, analytics, and evidence-based decision-making.

The epidemic and pandemic intelligence communities have lacked a global collaborative space to solve complex problems collectively, design systems and jointly evaluate and improve analytical tools.

The Collaboratory is a pragmatic shift in the way we, as a global pandemic and epidemic intelligence community connect, cultivate and co-design in the domain of data, analytics, and evidence-based decision-making for the prevention and response to public health threats.

The Collaboratory will provide a global epidemiological ecosystem that enhances the way the pandemic and epidemic intelligence community interact, collaborate, integrate data and solutions, make data and analytics discoverable, develop best practices flow and scale analytical strategies.

Working together we will achieve more effective collaborative intelligence and harness strong analytical capacities across a wide range of stakeholders with greater speed to insights.

Two projects are currently running within the initiative to connect data, information, insights and knowledge from every information system and data set, and harness the power of connected information for providing timely, accurate and actionable health intelligence.

1. Knowledge-graph-powered anomaly detection for COVID-19 and other infectious respiratory diseases – which aims to develop a proof-of-concept for a complex system of systems in collaboration with a consortium led by the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI), including Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Health (MEVIS), Neo4j Sweden AB and Causality Biomodels India.

2. Enhancing global preparedness and response capacity for infectious respiratory diseases through GISRS and public health intelligence – which aims to integrate sentinel and non-sentinel surveillance systems between themselves and with public health intelligence systems for enhanced insights, risk assessment and predictive analytics on the national level in six selected countries. This project is in the planning phase in collaboration with colleagues from the Global Influenza Programme of the WHO and the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Genomic sequencing technology has rapidly developed in recent years, with the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating the built-up of capacity worldwide. The expansion of pathogen genomics offers an opportunity to create an interlinked network of high-quality national, regional, and global pathogen genomics systems. Yet, despite its promise, pathogen genomics are not optimally deployed to avert pandemics and reduce endemic burdens. Country capacity remains uneven, innovations and best practices are insufficiently shared, and data sharing is beset by technical, political and bureaucratic problems. This results in incomplete data hampering decision making and limited identification of new pathogens and variants.

To address these challenges, the WHO Pandemic Hub has brought together partners to set up a new global network of pathogen genomic actors to improve public health decision making, the International Pathogen Surveillance Network (IPSN). The IPSN envisions a world where new pathogen threats are detected and fully characterized before becoming pandemics, and where the health and economic costs of endemic, epidemic, and pandemic diseases are reduced. It sets out to create a mutually supporting network of genomic surveillance actors with global coverage, that supports the development of faster and better national policy responses and medical countermeasures.

The IPSN consists of three main operational bodies that bring together different sets of stakeholders, including national and international lab networks and disease programs, public health systems, academic groups, private sector, and philanthropic and civil society actors. Partners collaborate in Communities of Practice (CoPs) to solve common challenges, such as data standards, tools, and data sharing, aiming to increase harmonization and innovation in pathogen genomics. In the country scale-up accelerator (CSUA), stakeholders work together to align efforts and enable South-South exchange to scale up country capacity building. The Funders Forum (FF) brings together important donors to catalyze additional grant funding that enables equity and powers IPSN projects and to coordinate donors around key needs and opportunities, helping to increase political attention and financing efficiency. In addition, high-level advocacy and communication help to keep pathogen genomic surveillance on the agenda, while the global partner forum for genomic surveillance brings all IPSN members together in an annual general meeting. The different bodies are convened and supported by a secretariat led by the WHO Pandemic Hub.

To date, the establishment of an evidence-base for collaborative surveillance has been ad hoc. The ecosystem for the development of methods, tools, and implementation approaches currently has limited strategic coherence, and insufficient attention has been given to translational efforts to implement research outputs and to conducting robust evaluation of impact. The increased pace of technological advancement can add to a confusing landscape. Without an evidence-base, there is potential for negative impact on public health surveillance due to further fragmentation, technological debt, and large opportunity costs.

Through an exercise to prioritize areas of research focus, the WHO Pandemic Hub aims to collaborate with partners to increase strategic coherence and alignment around topic areas of importance for researchers, funders and implementers, so that better investment decisions can be made, and greater impact achieved.

To that end, the WHO Pandemic Hub is leading a three-stage global consultation process to define the global research priorities for collaborative surveillance. In stage one, a range of expert interviews and a workshop with key stakeholders resulted in a framework for research prioritization. In stage two, a series of inclusive regional workshops will be set up to define priority topics, domains, and areas of the collaborative surveillance landscape around which stakeholders can align themselves and their work. Stage three will consist of a global, open consultation on defined priority topics and research questions. In addition, a mechanism will be created to record and advocate for progress, and to help to continuously reassess priority issues.