Manheim, David, Margaret Chamberlin, Osonde Osoba, Raffaele Vardavas and Melinda Moore. Improving Decision Support for Infectious Disease Prevention and Control: Aligning Models and Other Tools with Policymakers’ Needs. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016. http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1576.html.
This report describes decision-support tools, including models and nonmodeling approaches, that are relevant to infectious disease prevention, detection, and response and aligns these tools with real-world policy questions that the tools can help address. The intended audience includes technical experts — for example, modelers and subject-matter experts — and the policymakers that those experts can support.
Understanding the available models and other tools is critical for understanding uncertainties and considering how to address them. This report intends to move that discussion forward in the realm of infectious diseases.