The COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant understanding of evidence-informed decision making during public health emergencies. Imperial College London and the World Health Organization (WHO) Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence (WHO Hub) jointly organized a workshop to generate an understanding of the context and ways in which advanced analytics were used for decision making during the COVID-19 pandemic and to identify opportunities to strengthen the data-to-decisions pathways. Held on 9 – 10 May 2023 at the WHO Hub in Berlin, Germany, the workshop brought together mathematical modellers specialized in infectious disease modelling and scientists based at academic institutions, public health agencies, or Ministries of Health, and public health decision makers.

The workshop was conducted in four interactive group activities. The dialogue among participants led to the identification of potential opportunities for support and actions to strengthen the use of outputs from advanced analytics for decision making. These opportunities could be actions to strengthen processes and structures, improve workflows, find consensus on ways of working together, establish a knowledge foundation for support, and jointly drive evidence-based decision-making priorities for epidemic and pandemic preparedness. Workshop participants highlighted further need to capture additional perspectives held by actors from diverse geographical areas, contexts, and roles who were not present at the workshop, and political decision makers to enrich the understanding of the different priorities for advanced analytics for decision making in different regional and local contexts. The workshop highlighted the benefit in bringing together experts from around the globe to share experience and lessons learned to identify priority activities to tackling challenges and improve the way advanced analysis is perceived and used for policy and response decision making.

Overall, this workshop has contributed to a longstanding global dialogue on processes and systems to facilitate knowledge translation from data to decisions. Workshop participants collectively identified the need to develop a global network of advance analytics experts, with regional hub coordination to ensure inclusion and capacity building at local level. A network of modelers would be an interconnected community that would contribute to pandemic and epidemic rapid response while collectively improve how data are analyzed, actionable insights shared to inform decisions during public health emergencies and how models are evaluated and improved jointly.