The SaTScan Community of Practice is a collaborative space for U.S. public health departments and partners using, learning, or interested in using SaTScan for spatial and space-time cluster detection.
The goal of this community is to connect practitioners across jurisdictions so we can learn from one another, share practical experience, and improve how SaTScan methods are applied in public health practice.
Whether you are new to SaTScan or have been using it for years, this community is intended to provide a place to ask questions, compare approaches, and discuss challenges that arise when moving from statistical results to public health action.
This Community of Practice aims to support discussion and collaboration around topics such as:
- Getting started with SaTScan
- Understanding available statistical models and analysis options
- Developing reproducible workflows
- Learning from other public health jurisdictions using SaTScan
- Selecting appropriate spatial and temporal scanning parameters
- Choosing maximum cluster sizes and other analysis settings
- Comparing prospective and retrospective analyses
- Discussing methodological improvements and emerging approaches
- Comparing settings and approaches across jurisdictions
- Understanding statistically significant and non-significant clusters
- Evaluating cluster size, location, timing, and relative risk
- Distinguishing meaningful public health signals from statistical artifacts
- Discussing difficult or unusual results with other users
- Developing approaches for reviewing detected clusters
- Determining when a cluster warrants additional investigation
- Connecting SaTScan results with surveillance, epidemiologic, laboratory, environmental, or other data
- Sharing investigation workflows and decision criteria
- Discussing questions that arise during cluster investigations
- Sharing lessons learned from previous investigations
- Automating recurring analyses
- Integrating SaTScan into routine surveillance systems
- Managing data preparation and data quality issues
- Improving analysis workflows
- Communicating findings with epidemiologists, programs, leadership, and external partners
The community is intended primarily for people working in or with U.S. public health departments, including:
- Epidemiologists
- Data analysts and data scientists
- Informaticians
- Surveillance staff
- GIS professionals
- Public health researchers
- Academic and technical partners supporting public health agencies
Experience with SaTScan is not required.
Questions from new users are encouraged, and experienced users are invited to share examples, lessons learned, methods, and approaches that may benefit other jurisdictions.
Community members are encouraged to share resources that may be useful to other SaTScan users, including:
- Example workflows
- R, Python, or other code
- SaTScan parameter files
- Training materials
- Automation tools
Please ensure that any shared examples follow your organization's data governance and privacy requirements.
Please do not share identifiable, confidential, or protected health information in this repository. Participants are responsible for following their organization's data governance, privacy, security, and data-sharing requirements.
Official SaTScan website:
SaTScan documentation:
https://www.satscan.org/techdoc.html
This repository is intended to evolve based on the needs and interests of the Community of Practice.
Suggestions are welcome.
The broader goal is to build a network of public health practitioners who can learn from one another, improve SaTScan implementation, and strengthen the use of spatial and space-time cluster detection across public health jurisdictions.
Participation is encouraged.
If you have a question, idea, useful resource, workflow, or experience that may benefit other SaTScan users, please start a GitHub Discussion or contribute to the repository.
The strength of this Community of Practice comes from sharing what works, what does not, and what we are still trying to figure out.