CDC Analytics Partnership Aims to Advance Public Health Preparedness

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and software company Palantir Technologies Inc. announced a renewal of the organizations’ partnership to modernize the US public health infrastructure through software deployment and digital capability improvement.

Under the five-year, $443 million contract, the CDC will leverage the Palantir platform to employ scalable planning, management, and response solutions for future outbreaks and public health incidents. The partnership also aims to streamline existing programs that leverage Palantir’s solutions, including Health and Human Services (HHS) Protect, Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) Engage, Tiberius, and the Data Collation and Integration for Public Health Event Response (DCIPHER) Program.

This approach will support the CDC's ‘Common Operating Picture,’ an inter-agency enterprise investment to bolster collaboration between the federal government, jurisdictional health departments, private sector entities, and other key health stakeholders. Using Palantir’s software, these groups will work to advance disease surveillance and outbreak response, support supply chain resiliency, and deploy medical countermeasures to public health emergencies, according to the press release.

"Palantir is extremely proud to continue its partnership with the CDC, ASPR, and HHS to strengthen America's public health infrastructure through leading-edge preparedness technology," said Hirsh Jain, head of public health, federal at Palantir, in the press release. "This contract solidifies the important digital advancements in public health made during the pandemic and expands the CDC's capacity to create a sustainable and long-term approach beyond COVID-19."

The collaboration builds on investments recently made in US public health infrastructure by the CDC in pandemic preparedness, emergency response, integrated public health surveillance, and supply chain management and aims to utilize lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Earlier this year, CDC and Palantir extended their 10-year partnership to address outbreak response and disease surveillance through the DCIPHER Program, which allows stakeholders to leverage Palantir’s Foundry platform to integrate data, conduct analysis, and create operational workflows for public health needs. 

The DCIPHER platform has been used to handle foodborne illness outbreaks, counter Ebola, as well as manage respiratory, anthrax, and bacterial special pathogens. Additionally, the program helps address genomics-specific data challenges.

The partnership renewal also comes months after CDC launched its Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA), which aims to improve outbreak and public health threat response by using infectious disease modeling and analytics to enable timely, effective decision-making by leaders at federal, state, and local levels. CFA also aims to develop a program for providing infectious disease event insights to the public to inform individual decision-making.