# Austin Public Health **Entity class:** Local public-health department **Austin Public Health (APH)** is the public-health department serving Austin and Travis County. In the COVID-19 modeling cluster, APH supplied public-health authority, local surveillance and contact-tracing operations, and an operational pathway between epidemiological analysis and municipal response. Research by the [[wiki/UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium|UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium]] and [[wiki/Dell Medical School|Dell Medical School]] used [[wiki/COVID-19|COVID-19]] contact-tracing data collected by Dell Medical School under APH authority to estimate the effect of tracing delays and later to monitor intervention effectiveness. This is a concrete data-governance edge: Dell Medical School performed research and data work within an APH-authorized local public-health process. ## Relationships - **department of / serves:** [[wiki/City of Austin|City of Austin]] and the Austin–Travis County public-health jurisdiction. - **research partners:** [[wiki/Dell Medical School|Dell Medical School]], [[wiki/Meyers Lab|Meyers Lab]], and [[wiki/UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium|UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium]]. - **analytic functions:** [[wiki/Contact Tracing|Contact Tracing]], [[wiki/Biosurveillance|Biosurveillance]], and [[wiki/Public Health Modeling|Public Health Modeling]]. ## Sources / Provenance - [Delays in Contact Tracing Impeded Early COVID-19 Containment — Dell Medical School](https://dellmed.utexas.edu/news/delays-in-contact-tracing-impeded-early-covid-19-containment) (2022). - [Real time monitoring of COVID-19 intervention effectiveness through contact tracing data](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-35892-0) (Scientific Reports, 2023).