A shared direction for the VitaAlert advisory team through the project's early development phase.
This roadmap provides a shared direction for the advisory team during VitaAlert's early development phase. It is not a fixed work plan or a contractual commitment. Rather, it identifies where expert guidance will help shape VitaAlert into a scientifically robust, operationally practical and globally relevant epidemic intelligence platform. It is expected to evolve through ongoing discussion and input from the team.
Over the next six months, our collective goal is to transform VitaAlert from a working concept into a scientifically validated, operationally credible platform suitable for pilot deployment, grant funding and strategic partnerships.
Helping health authorities stay ahead of epidemic spread — through better operational intelligence, prediction and coordination.
Build a common understanding of VitaAlert's purpose, scope and scientific direction.
Strengthen VitaAlert's scientific credibility and operational design.
Ensure VitaAlert reflects real-world outbreak response requirements.
Prepare VitaAlert for external engagement and pilot implementation.
The advisory team will contribute across five collaborative workstreams.
Ensure scientific validity and epidemiological accuracy.
Ensure VitaAlert reflects real operational realities.
Strengthen medical and laboratory relevance.
Develop practical decision-support tools.
Support long-term sustainability.
Participation remains entirely voluntary. There are no minimum time commitments. Members are encouraged to contribute whenever their expertise, availability and interest allow. Contributions may include reviewing documents, providing scientific feedback, participating in meetings, sharing publications, introducing collaborators, identifying funding opportunities, advising on implementation, challenging assumptions and helping improve VitaAlert.
Every contribution is valued.
As VitaAlert develops, we will seek to ensure that every recommendation strengthens one or more of the following objectives:
By the end of this initial roadmap period, we hope to have achieved:
This roadmap is intentionally presented as a discussion document. Every advisor has been invited because of their experience and judgement. We encourage everyone to challenge assumptions, suggest improvements, and help shape VitaAlert into a platform capable of making a meaningful contribution to epidemic preparedness and outbreak response across Africa.
The pages above describe our current thinking. This one is deliberately open. VitaAlert is designed to evolve through your expertise, not to follow a fixed plan. The ideas below are illustrative possibilities we're curious about — none are commitments, and the list is far from complete. We'd like your help pressure-testing them, discarding the weak ones, and adding the ones we haven't thought of.
A few examples to spark discussion
Linking sequencing data to spread models to flag emerging strains earlier.
Using flooding, rainfall or population-movement data as leading indicators for cholera and vector-borne disease.
Aggregated, privacy-preserving movement patterns to anticipate cross-border transmission corridors.
Feeding rapid-test and laboratory results directly into risk scoring and the shared operational picture.
Predicting stockouts of PPE, vaccines and therapeutics, and optimising last-mile delivery under constraint.
Connections to Africa CDC, WHO, national labs, universities or telecoms that could unlock new data or reach.
Proposals don't need to be polished. A paragraph, a paper, a contact, or a question is enough. When something occurs to you, it helps us to know:
Share ideas in the VitaAlert Advisory Team WhatsApp group, or reply directly. Every suggestion genuinely helps shape the platform — including the ones that lead us to rule an option out.
The strongest ideas from this open call will be worked into future versions of the roadmap, credited to the advisors who raised them.
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