COVID-19 Focused Cost-benefit Analysis of Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Crisis Response Programs

Thursday, December 11, 2025 - 12:00pm

Speaker

Nancy McMillan, Data Science Research Leader, Health Research & Analytics Business Line at Battelle

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Overview

Background: The United States (US) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) plays a crucial role in supporting state, local, and territorial governments through the Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) cooperative agreement program. During the COVID-19 pandemic, supplemental funding was available to bolster response efforts through the Public Health Crisis Response (PHCR) cooperative agreement. PHEP and PHCR program implementation data was used to evaluate the COVID-19 response effectiveness through a cost-benefit analysis.

Methods: Annual workplans and progress reports provided significant components of the program implementation information for both PHEP and PHCR. Natural language processing was used to recode recipient workplans, which allowed us to standardize common implementation across recipients. Path analysis and lasso regression models were used to assess the relationship between reported activities and outcomes. These methods addressed the issue of handling a big-p (activities), little-n (recipients) problem. Outcomes assessed included time to implement control measures, availability of COVID-19 therapeutics, COVID-19 tests and vaccines administered, and hospital bed availability. The benefits associated with specific implementation decisions (funding allocation, planned activities, and outputs) were estimated for statistically significant relationships.

Results: Activities and outputs were associated with faster non-essential business closures, earlier implementation of mask mandates, more frequent reporting to the public, more COVID-19 test administration, and larger availability of hospital beds and COVID-19 therapeutics during surges.  Additionally, funding allocations for 4 of the 6 preparedness capability domain areas (countermeasures and mitigation, incident management, information management, and surge management) were associated with the ability to administer more COVID-19 tests and vaccines and increased hospital bed availability during peak surges. 

Conclusions: PHEP and PHCR funding had measurable positive effects on recipients’ ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic effectively. Ongoing efforts in specific areas of public health emergency preparedness will improve future responses to COVID-19-like events.

About the Speaker

Nancy McMillan currently serves as Data Science Research Leader within Battelle’s Health Research & Analytics Business Line. For a diverse set of federal government clients, she currently leads development of a large language model (LLM) based biocuration acceleration pipeline and user tool, development of pipelines, analytics, and visualizations of electronic initial case reporting data, and development of analytical methods for achieving abbreviated new drug application (ANDA) approval for an agile drug manufacturing technology. Nancy has a long history of collaborative work across Battelle bringing statistics and machine learning to Battelle’s deep capability in biology, chemistry, and material science. As a researcher and Project Management Professional, Nancy has worked and published on environmental exposure and risk assessment; transportation safety benefits; quantitative risk assessment related to chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) terrorism; bio surveillance; and bioinformatics. She managed the Health Analytics Division from 2017-2023, a team of approximately 100 data scientists that supports Battelle’s contract research business. Nancy is a member of the Board of Trustees for the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS), the Chair of NISS’s Affiliates Committee, and a member of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network’s Data Advisory Committee.

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