Tiberius – a data mining software designed by Palantir – will be critical in helping community health workers target COVID-19 vaccination education efforts.

11th November 2020 by Dr. Anthony Salandy

It is imperative for states to identify distribution bottlenecks, inventory constraints, and gaps in administration of the COVID-19 vaccine across key populations and geographical contexts for the vaccination program to be effective. That is why Tiberius, a data mining software designed by Palantir, is a critically important tool in our fight against the virus as the COVID-19 vaccine is rolled out.  

The Tiberius system would collect data from federal agencies, local and state governments, pharmaceutical firms and distributors and enable health officials to integrate a wide range of demographic, employment and public health data sets to identify the location of priority populations and make decisions when it comes to allocating vaccine doses.

Community health workers and advocates can use data from Tiberius to identify communities that need further education about the benefits of being vaccinated for COVID-19. States should use data from Tiberius across sectors so that everyone is using the same playbook and acting on the same data point. Summary data captured Tiberius should be transparent. Currently, few CBOs have access to Tiberius data. States should produce a portal so that summary data captured and curated by Tiberius could be accessed by local community-based organizations.  

New Jersey and other states have requested Tiberius Analytic Support subject matter experts to be embedded in their COVID-19 task force. The subject matter experts would ensure that states are optimally using the data available through Tiberius and other federal systems to monitor vaccination efforts, inform programmatic activities, and meet the federal reporting metric requirements.