Civis’s New Vaccine Outreach Intelligence Center Saves Teams Weeks Of Back-End Data Work

Civis Analytics, a data science firm innovating at the intersection of public good and scientific best practices, today announced the launch of its Vaccine Outreach Intelligence Center (VOIC), a comprehensive suite of data and interactive tools enabling rapid COVID-19 vaccine planning and outreach campaigns.

To achieve herd immunity, COVID-19 vaccine outreach teams must understand unvaccinated populations — where they are, and what barriers they face (both attitudinal and situational). And that requires collecting and assembling a wealth of data siloed across different sources, stored in different formats and updated at different frequencies, which could take weeks or even months to build from scratch.

VOIC provides a library of data and models alongside an interactive map-based application, allowing community organizations and government agencies to skip the back-end data work and get straight to planning and outreach. Benefits of the tool include:

• All updated, complete data in one place: VOIC comes packaged with pre-aggregated and standardized public and purpose-built data assets, providing a view on demographics, social determinants of health, and potential barriers to accessing a COVID vaccine. It can also include any geographic points of interest, enabling teams to leverage linked, harmonized, and geolocated data sources that are otherwise siloed (and oftentimes, incomplete). Regular data refreshes keep your intelligence up to date, and data are protected within our HIPAA-compliant/SOC 2 Type II-certified infrastructure.
• Modeled metrics of interest: Publicly available demographic, economic, and health status data are only proxies for key quantities of interest. Who is hesitant to be vaccinated? How do you distinguish hesitancy from lacking the digital literacy to navigate an appointment system? VOIC includes a subscription to several hundred additional variables, including Civis’s models predicting COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and vaccination status.
• Better visibility into vaccination equity: The CDC reports that over half of vaccine data is missing the race/ethnicity of the person who was vaccinated. VOIC fills the gap in public data with comprehensive demographic data, providing an accurate picture of distribution patterns and insight into where more focused efforts are warranted.
• Increased visibility and collaboration, both internally and across partners: Government, nonprofit, and public health partners can work together from a single source of data truth. For example, epidemiologists and other technical users can download and interact with the underlying data; community engagement leaders and outreach coordinators can build custom audiences to inform campaigns; and program directors can use the map-based interface to glean high-level insights into progress to date.

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VOIC uses the same backend technology as Civis’s Census Intelligence Center, which was successfully implemented by Harris County and the State of Michigan, among others, and recognized by organizations like Fast Company and Engaging Local Government Leaders (ELGL).

“Data describing vaccinations or vaccine hesitancy is typically limited to standard demographics that can be very one-size-fits-all,” said Crystal Son, MPH, Director of Healthcare Analytics at Civis Analytics. “But we can and should be looking deeper at the data to go beyond just describing who these populations are, how large they are and where they reside. If we want to achieve results quickly and efficiently, we need to ask questions like: What are the best ways to reach them? Is it a messaging barrier (for example, do people think it costs money to get the vaccine)? Is it that some populations lack internet access to book an appointment? It’s a race against time to answer these types of questions, so we need to have the data and tools ready at our fingertips.”

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