Paper Information

Organizations from a diversity of sectors across North Carolina (including public health, education, business, government, religion, and public safety) have used decision-support modeling to inform decision making during COVID-19.Decision makers wish for models to project the spread of disease, especially at the local level (e.g., individual cities and counties), and to help estimate the outcomes of policies.Some organizational decision makers are hesitant to use modeling to inform their decisions, stemming from doubts that models could reflect nuances of human behavior, concerns about the accuracy and precision of data used in models, and the limited amount of modeling available at the local level.

Decision makers perceived modeling as valuable for informing organizational decisions yet described varied ability and willingness to use models for this purpose. These data present an opportunity to educate organizational decision makers on the merits of decision-support modeling and to inform modeling teams on how to build more responsive models that address the needs of organizational decision makers.