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Freifeld Clark

HealthMap is a real-time disease epidemic intelligence tracking and visualization system that collects information from general news media, individual first-hand reports and public health sources around the world. Gaps in this effort clearly occur during times of crisis where traditional mechanisms may be dismantled. Clinical information gathered by deployed physicians can play a key role in providing early insight on emerging public health threats. We developed OutbreakMD to gather such information in real-time and combine with existing HealthMap informal and formal surveillance techniques. 

Objective

OutbreakMD is a mobile Web application that was piloted in post-earthquake Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The application is designed for collecting, organizing and visualizing clinical information from individual patients to better monitor emerging infectious disease in disaster situations, in situations with limited public health infrastructure and unreliable Internet connectivity

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Submitted by uysz on

HealthMap (www.healthmap.org) is a freely accessible, automated real-time system that monitors, organizes, integrates, filters, and maps online news about emerging diseases. The system performs geographic parsing (“geo-parsing”) of disease outbreaks by assigning incoming alerts to low resolution geographic descriptions, such as  country, with the help of a purposely crafted gazetteer. However, the system is limited by the size of the gazetteer, precluding high resolution assignment of place. In this study, we use the prior knowledge encoded in the gazetteer to expand the capabilities of the geo-parsing system.

 

Objective

Discovering geographic references in text is a task that human readers perform using both their lexical and contextual knowledge. Automating this task for real-time surveillance of informal sources on epidemic intelligence therefore requires efforts beyond dictionary-based pattern matching. Here, we describe an automated approach to learning the particular context in which outbreak locations appear and by this means extending prior knowledge encoded in a gazetteer.

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Submitted by elamb on

While traditional means of surveillance by governments, multi-national agencies, and institutional networks assist in reporting and confirming infectious disease outbreaks, these formal sources of information are limited by their geographic coverage and timeliness of information flow. In contrast, rapid global reach of electronic communication has resulted in the advent of informal sources of information on outbreaks. Informal resources include discussion sites, online news media, individual and organization reports and even individual search records. The earliest descriptions of the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in Guangdon Province, south China came from informal reports. However, system development to date has been geared toward knowledge management and strategies for interpreting these data are underdeveloped. There is a need to move from simple knowledge reorganization to an analytic approach for disseminating timely yet specific signals.

 

Objective

Internet-based resources such as discussion sites and online news sources have become invaluable sources for a new wave of surveillance systems. The WHO relies on these informal sources for about 65% of their outbreak investigations. Despite widespread use of unstructured information there has been little, if any, data evaluation.

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Submitted by elamb on

Previous studies have documented significant lags in official reporting of outbreaks compared to unofficial reporting (1,2). MoH+ provides an additional tool to analyze this issue, with the unique advantage of actively gathering a wide range of streamlined official communication, including formal publications, online press releases, and social media updates.

Objective:

To introduce MoH+, HealthMap’s (HM) real-time feed of official government sources, and demonstrate its utility in comparing the timeliness of outbreak reporting between official and unofficial sources.

 

Submitted by Magou on

In the South East Asia Region (SEAR), infectious disease continues to be a leading cause of death. SEAR countries, like Vietnam, are also at risk for outbreaks of emerging diseases due to high population density, proximity to animals and deforestation. Given Vietnam’s location in SEAR and its recurrent outbreaks of zoonotic diseases— timely surveillance in Vietnam is critical to global public health. Online news sources have been recognized as potential sources for early detection of emerging disease outbreaks, as was the case with SARS.  HealthMap, an innovative disease surveillance system developed at Boston Children’s Hospital, leverages the expediency of online news media by using text-mining technology to monitor and map global disease outbreaks reported by news sources.

Objective

To present the development of a surveillance system utilizing online Vietnamese language media sources to detect disease events in Vietnam and the South East Asian Region.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on
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