New JAMIA Article: Responding to COVID-19

Earlier this year we reported news about a unique VACLab service project in collaboration with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) in response to the new-at-the-time COVID-19 pandemic.

As part of a volunteer effort, VACLab teammates Smiti Kaul and David Gotz worked with Cameron Coleman from UNC Health and staff at the NC DHHS branch for Public Health Preparedness & Response to develop an internal (not for the general public) dashboard of morgue facilities across the state of North Carolina. The goal of the project was to keep emergency management staff in county and state governments informed about emerging scarcity of resources, and to help decision makers make effective and timely choices about how resources can be shared in a coordinated response. The active portion of the project is done for those in the VACLab, but the dashboard continues to be used as a valuable emergency management tool during the ongoing pandemic.

The UNC-based team responsible for the project wrote about their work in a new article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA). The article is in press after being accepted for publication, but has not yet appeared in print. A preprint is available from the article’s page on this website.