Using spatiotemporal analysis to evaluate intervention effectiveness

Use spatiotemporal analytics to scientifically evaluate intervention(s) effectiveness across communities, promoting mass adoption of those that work.

Cory Siskind, CEO

In response to a global pandemic, global coordination and collaboration is required to determine the most effective interventions at the community level. COVID-19 saw disparate intervention responses across communities, driven by both scientific research and political agendas.  No large-scale, coordinated experiments were carried out to evaluate which interventions were most effective in curbing the spread of the disease within and between communities.  When interventions were applied, it was hard for public health experts to directly assert the effectiveness of the interventions at the community-level, leading to skepticism by some groups and decreased uptake.   

This problem exists due to the lack of data standards, tools, and methodologies that can be used to evaluate an intervention's effect on community outcomes using the scientific method (hypothesize, experiment, analyze, conclude). Without community-level experiments and analyses, there can be no scientifically validated conclusions on which interventions work best.  There are only hypotheses based on individual or lab-based experiments.

This lack of scientific rigor at the community-level lessens intervention uptake within communities and across borders as countries lack the body of evidence to gain support for interventions that "appear" to be working in others.  

This solution serves community leaders and scientists around the globe, giving them the ability to apply the scientific method to determine an intervention’s efficacy at the community-level.  This solution allows stakeholders to assess ongoing experiments globally, and adopt those that are shown to be effective without duplicating the experiment themselves.  

Base Operations has had interaction with members of our targeted audience: Base Operations conducted 6+ hours of discussions with the Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, part of the CDC Foundation, in an attempt to deepen our knowledge of the issue set. The Executive Director,  explained the challenge of deploying vaccines and measuring interventions and proposed engaging Base Operations as a partner in resolving this issue. Base Operations also counts Moderna among its customers, the developer and producer of one COVID-19 vaccine. We support them in their efforts to keep their assets and personnel safe while manufacturing and distributing the vaccine in communities around the world. 

If awarded, the Base Operations team will interact with public health organizations and local communities to understand how the solution can best meet their needs.

• This solution will provide the following public goods:
  • Selected dashboards where stakeholders can view selected data on communities around the world, at cost.
  • Shareable reports, based on analysis by users.
  • At-cost storage of data collected.

Our solution will create a tangible impact for communities and scientists looking to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions on global health emergencies. They will have tools that enable scientific analyses of intervention efficacy in communities, allowing them to arrive at data-driven conclusions.

Data-driven conclusions can be shared globally, across communities, promoting the acceptance and uptake of the most effective interventions.  In this way, the solution also serves the broader population.

The solution allows for coordinated and collaborative efforts across communities, allowing for the efficient expenditure of resources when conducting experiments.

The global community is also benefited by the standardization of data, allowing for rapid community onboarding and stakeholder engagement.

Through the use of a scalable IT architecture, the definition of standardized data, and agile software development practices, the solution is designed to scale in both the number of communities it serves and the capability it provides.

The first year will focus on standardizing data formats with institutions and providing minimum viable product functionality for analytics and reporting.  It will also focus on onboarding communities that are already "data-rich".

With these foundations in place - scaling global impact is a matter of working with communities to integrate their data into the solution, using standard processes and training users when needed. The solution will provide resources for rapidly onboarding communities who want to "plug-and-play".

The impact of this solution will be evaluated against data being collected, time to integration, and user feedback.

• The solution will measure itself by the number of communities/countries supported (assuming their desire to participate)
• The time it takes to integrate a community that wishes to be onboarded
• User feedback, which will drive solution capabilities.

• Barriers to this solution's success are:
  • The global community arriving at standard data formats that are robust enough to allow for meaningful analysis.  We believe accomplishing this is more than feasible with strong commitment from global health organizations.
  • A community's ability to collect and share data.  Collecting insightful data requires the infrastructure to do so. It is assumed that once data is collected, there will be scientists who can use the solution to analyze the data.

• MIT Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship

• Harvard iLab

• The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship

• Techstars Impact 2018

• Good Growth Capital

• Gaingels

• Glasswing Ventures

• Underscore VC

• Mindshare

Base Operations is applying to the Trinity Challenge because it believes its novel solution can be extended to support the global public health community in addressing the next global health crisis by enabling scientific evaluation of intervention effectiveness.

The proposed solution is already used for one problem set, and the team is looking to prove extensibility to others. The Trinity Challenge provides an opportunity to do so and will help Base Operations demonstrate the utility of its solution across use-cases. It also allows Base Operations to serve the public with its technology and have social impact.

Base Operations would like to partner with public health experts in academia, NGOs, and other global health organizations to define standard data formats for use by its solution.

Base Operations would also like to work with public health scientists to confirm how the solution could best be used for evaluating intervention efficacy within communities.  Public health scientists will have input into the product roadmap, helping Base Operations ensure features are user-friendly and prioritized appropriately.