Innovative New Features Added to SOAR Platform

IRS’s Development team for the STLT Outbreak, Analytics, and Response (SOAR) platform continued to add new and improved features to SOAR in line with specific STLT partner needs. Notably, the UCSC Genomics Institute’s Cluster Tracker tool, which IRS successfully integrated into the SOAR platform, provides an easily accessible user interface that enhances public health departments’ insights into state and local viral transmission dynamics and aids in outbreak investigations. The tool achieves this by linking to the UCSC-developed UShER module within SOAR. Moreover, to improve user data interpretability, SOAR now offers improved disease forecasting tools, including a streamlined model selection process, dashboard and mapping layout enhancements, and validation of lab testing results. SOAR’s new additions seek to further Insight Net’s wider objective of bolstering disease outbreak monitoring and prevention tools nationwide.