Draft:PHICOR

Public Health Informatics, Computational, and Operations Research (PHICOR) is a research and development group that builds and utilizes computer modeling to understand and address issues in health.

History
Since 2007, PHICOR, founded by Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, has been using its computer models to help decision makers address complex issues in health. This includes the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine supply chains, obesity, and nutrition.

In 2009, the PHICOR team was embedded in the Department of Health and Human Services to help with the national response to the H1N1 influenza pandemic.

In 2010, the PHICOR team began building and utilizing its HERMES (Highly Extensible Resource for Modeling Supply-chains) model to help decision makers and other stakeholders to analyze supply chains of vaccines and other medical supplies to make them more efficient and reliable. In 2018, the HERMES software became available to the public.

In 2014, the PHICOR’s became founding members of Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program’s Project Play, a consortium of businesses, federal agencies, foundations, major sports leagues and associations and researchers that work to identify gaps in access and quality in sports for young people. The PHICOR team's models were utilized to better understand the impact of increasing youth sport participation.

In 2015, the PHICOR team partnered with Global Fund to help with Malaria control strategies. PHICOR also started working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Chicago PROTECT (Providing Regional Organizations with TEchniques to ConTrol MDROs) and SHIELD Orange County (Shared Healthcare Intervention to Eliminate Life-threatening Dissemination of MDROs) projects.

In 2018, PHICOR worked with Walgreens to understand value of pharmacies distributing vaccines during an epidemic.

In 2021, The New York Times adapted PHICOR’s models to visualize county-level immunity against the delta variant and determine when US would reach herd immunity.

In 2022, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded PHICOR over $12.4 million over five years to establish the world’s first artificial intelligence (AI) and computational modeling center for precision nutrition and health.