Giving Compass' Take:

• This Médecins sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) details a new project called The R for Epis (R4Epis) initiative that's aiming to save epidemiologists time in a crisis.

• R4Epis uses a library of standard, context-specific analysis tools to help streamline disease research. What can international aid organizations learn about data sharing from this effort?

• Here's why social science research is also a much-needed tool for epidemic control.

My first assignment with MSF was in Am Timan, Chad, during an ongoing hepatitis E outbreak.

Epidemiologists are key to MSF teams responding to disease outbreaks. By gathering information about who has got the disease, epidemiologists can look for patterns and help teams understand how fast a disease is spreading, and how it can be stopped.

As an epidemiologist, or “epi” working as part of an MSF response, I expected — and was prepared — to face challenges, and potentially some serious obstacles.

What didn’t occur to me was that my first hurdle would be doing something as familiar to me as data management and analysis.

Data management is one of the cornerstones of epidemiology — we need to have all our information organized before we can start using it to get insights about an outbreak.

During my handover with my predecessor I was not willing to waste any precious time discussing the statistical software I used for data analysis. Nor did it even cross my mind to do so. As any epi will understand; I was comfortable with one particular type of data analysis software. At that moment, in the midst of an outbreak, I wasn’t really prepared to consider switching to a new software for data analysis purposes.

However, my predecessor’s data analysis software “loyalty” lay elsewhere. That meant that I inherited some data analysis scripts in an unfamiliar software suite and that I had to spend most of my time trying to re-write these into the software scripts that I was familiar with.

Read the full article about a new innovation in epidemiology by Larissa Vernier at Doctors Without Borders.