Healthcare Modeling Workforce Development Through Washington State University's Resistance Epidemiology Modeling Initiative

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT There is a growing need for well-trained, methodologically sophisticated epidemiological modelers, especially in healthcare settings. Addressing persistent and emerging healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) such as S. aureus, C. difficile and C. auris require sophisticated modeling approaches that can represent the complex and dynamic healthcare environment. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has also demonstrated the need for, and value of, modeling support at the state and local level, as well as within hospital systems to address the specific needs of a diverse range of stakeholders during a public health emergency. The proposed project, "Healthcare Modeling Workforce Development Through Washington State University's Resistance Epidemiology Modeling Initiative" seeks to leverage the growing, modeling and methods focused, interdisciplinary research programs at Washington State University. These programs address healthcare-associated infections, emerging infectious diseases, and antimicrobial resistance, and draw from expertise in epidemiology, statistics, mathematics, and computer science, and have a strong track record of collaboration with clinicians and policymakers. The proposed project would fund three epidemiology modeling fellows from a variety of potential academic backgrounds. These fellows will be engaged in three projects: (1) Understanding the tendency of emerging infectious diseases to accelerate when they reach the healthcare system (termed "Nosocomial Amplification"), (2) the evaluation of existing models and model-based guidance for its generalizability to rural and community healthcare settings, and (3) developing methods to model and simulate within- and between- hospital patient transfer networks, to better understand how these networks are formed, allow studies that disrupt these networks, and to make often sensitive data more widely accessible in the form of synthetic networks. Each of these projects touches on one or more HAIs of public health importance and address several thematic areas including antimicrobial resistance, patient connectiveness, health equity, outbreak response, simulation of epidemiological studies, systems approaches and zoonotic diseases. The fellowship program will be led by Dr. Eric Lofgren, an infectious disease epidemiologist and director of the Resistance Epidemiology Modeling Initiative (REMI), a multidisciplinary effort to support antimicrobial resistance and healthcare-associated infection research at WSU. Dr. Lofgren has extensive experience in mathematical and computational modeling of infectious diseases and specializes in the modeling of HAIs. The proposed fellowship program would give fellows access to a diverse range of opportunities for collaboration across different academic disciplines and support for professional development opportunities. With both local and national collaborative ties, the program would position fellows to become the next generation of healthcare modeling experts.