The CDC Foundation helps the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) save and improve lives by unleashing the power of collaboration between CDC, philanthropies, corporations, organizations and individuals to protect the health, safety and security of America and the world. The CDC Foundation is the sole entity authorized by Congress to mobilize philanthropic partners and private-sector resources to support CDC’s critical health protection mission. Since 1995, the CDC Foundation has launched approximately 1,000 programs and has served as a strategic partner to CDC during public health emergencies. This is an outstanding opportunity to work with the nation’s lead agency charged with protecting the public’s health.
Overview
The CDC Foundation is seeking a Syndromic Surveillance Epidemiologist in Shoreline, WA. This Syndromic Surveillance Epidemiologist role contributes to this mission by performing public health surveillance and enhancing surveillance practice focused on COVID-19. With syndromic surveillance data submitted by hospitals, emergency departments (EDs) and outpatient clinics. These activities improve OCDE and DOH’s capacity to identify COVID-19 disease trends, conduct disease investigations, improve detection of clusters and hot spots, and provide essential information to inform control measures for COVID-19 in Washington State. This work is done to support DOH’s Rapid Health Information NetwOrk (RHINO) and supports the effective use of public health data and surveillance systems supported and utilized by DOH, LHJ, and tribal epidemiologists.
Responsibilities
• Evaluates and enhances syndromic queries and definitions used to monitor for trends in clinical encounters related to COVID-19 and other associated health conditions
• Develops processes for the detection of suspected spatial-temporal clusters of COVID-19 in support of outbreak investigation and control efforts
• Works with investigators and others supporting outbreak response to identify opportunities to leverage syndromic surveillance data to better characterize and respond to issues related to COVID-19, including potential spillover health effects unrelated to direct infections
• Designs, develops, and produces datasets, reports, and data visualizations to show trends in COVID-19 activity using syndromic surveillance data for use by DOH practitioners, local heath jurisdictions and tribes, and others as needed
• Assist with efforts to model the COVID-19 outbreak in Washington to better predict geographical spread, severity, impact on persons at increased risk, burden on the healthcare system, and other key factors
• Develops, validates, and utilizes advanced analytical tools including text mining and machine learning to improve surveillance practice
• Develop, monitor, and summarize syndromic surveillance indicators for lifting or implementing non-pharmaceutical interventions across the state
• Use syndromic surveillance data to describe comorbidities and outcomes of COVID-19 cases
• Develop innovative methods to analyze trends in data given drastic and frequent changes in underlying data
• Provide support to local health jurisdiction, DOH, and other personnel on appropriate use and interpretation of syndromic surveillance data.
• Ensures that validated patient visit data for participating ILINet clinics and hospitals are available to CDC. As appropriate, expands participation in ILINet among syndromic surveillance data submitters
• Extracts and analyzes the syndromic surveillance data that will be used to determine the percentage of visits due to influenza-like illness, and characterizes the population served by each facility
• Monitors processes that link syndromic surveillance records to case reports of confirmed COVID-19 cases.
• Compile and summarize data obtained from external data sources to enable more complete description of hospitalization and ventilator status, among other key variables
• Participates in communicable disease epidemiology preparedness exercises and training.
• Provides surge capacity for the communicable disease epidemiology office in responding to public health emergencies.
• Provides on-site or in-office coverage capacity for communicable disease emergency response, including after hours or weekend response
• Collaborates with the Division of Emergency Preparedness and Response (EPR) and other DOH programs on planning and response for public health emergencies.
• May serve on DOH emergency response teams including the Epidemiology Response Team
• Quality Improvement
• Progress Reporting
• Local/State/National Involvement
• Participates in workgroups and communities of practice to enhance surveillance practice in Washington and to share lessons learned with other practitioners and jurisdictions
• Other duties as assigned
Qualifications
• A Master’s degree in epidemiology, or a Master’s degree in public health including 12 graduate quarter hours or equivalent (500 level or above) in epidemiology and 12 graduate quarter hours or equivalent in biostatistics.
• Prior experience in public health epidemiology research and analysis.
• Intermediate to advanced proficiency in R programming, especially use of packages in the tidyverse.
• Experience practicing syndromic surveillance using the ESSENCE platform or similar
• Experience analyzing and interpreting clinical data especially from hospitals and Emergency Departments
• Experience with SQL.
• Experience with Rhapsody
• Experience working in communicable disease epidemiology
• Knowledge of Health Level 7 (HL7) messaging
• Experience with electronic medical record systems and/or using medical record data
• Experience developing geospatial visualizations and/or developing spatial-temporal cluster detection
• Experience with machine learning including natural language processing
• Experience preparing effective data visualizations
• Experience working with stakeholders and/or customer service background
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, mental or physical disabilities, veteran status, and all other characteristics protected by law. We comply with all applicable laws including E.O. 11246 and the Vietnam Era Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 governing employment practices and do not discriminate on the basis of any unlawful criteria in accordance with 41 C.F.R. §§ 60-300.5(a)(12) and 60-741.5(a)(7). As a federal government contractor, we take affirmative action on behalf of protected veterans.
The CDC Foundation is a smoke-free environment.
Relocation expenses are not included.
Find posting and application here: https://www.cdcfoundation.org/jobs