Health Map: Global Disease-Tracking Alert System

There is no doubt in most minds that the internet is going to play a pivotal part in the future of humankind. We’ve already seen the hidden benefits in programs like Twitter, which have kept people up to date on everything from raging forest fires to earthquakes. And the blogging from within Myanmar and China is an example of just how real information can get out from the most unlikely of sources.

But the one pitfall that exists at the moment is that there is simply too much information floating around, and not many good ways to find it. Sure, Twitter and blogging is all good and well, but you have to be aware of these to make use of them, and even then, the sheer mass of information flowing around you is going to make it hard to narrow down just what you are looking for.

So that is why HealthMap exists, in what will one day, hopefully, be a veritable lifesaver for people across the planet.

Siphoning information from Google News, the World Health Organization, and online discussion groups and forums, HealthMap exists to filter that news in to understandable and controlled bits of information, which are then mapped on a Google Maps-like board, showing the outbreak of disease. But we’re not just talking about diseases that are going to end up on your TV screens on the other side of the world; HealthMap makes no distinctions.

"There is so much information on the web about disease outbreaks but it's obscured by garbage and noise," said John Brownstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and co-founder of HealthMap.org. "The idea of HealthMap is to get filtered, valuable information to the public and public health community in one freely available resource."

HealthMap has been refined and refined until, at last count, it has an accuracy rating pushing up on 90%, according to researchers who recently published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Under the technical lead of Clark Freifeld, a software developer at Children’s Hospital Boston, HealthMap is able to differentiate between news stories about an outbreak and government vaccinations or public health.

This is done through looking for keywords, focusing on the verbiage that reporters use when covering an outbreak, compared to that of a vaccination plan. Key words like “mysterious” often appear with an outbreak and sadly, more often than not, numbers denoting how many people have been infected, or killed.

Google.org’s Predict and Prevent Initiative – Google’s attempt to use information and technology to “empower communities to predict and prevent emerging threats – has taken a shine to HealthMap, providing a $450,000 grant in 2007 to help the free website continue."We really like their approach in that they are trying … a really open platform," said Mark Smolinski, director of Predict and Prevent initiative at Google.org. "Anybody can go in and see what kind of health threats are showing up around the world."

And HealthMap is already in use. Hannah Gould, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control in the US, used HealthMap to trace reports of a recent E. coli outbreak in a major supermarket chain. "It's a timely synthesis from many different sources into one place," Gould said. "It allows for a quick visualization of health events that you wouldn't otherwise have in other formats."

Posted by Josh Hill.

Sources:

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/07/researchers-tra.html
http://www.healthmap.org/en
http://www.google.org/predict.html