Healthmap

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

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.

 

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.

HealthMap collects and aggregates information from online sources to generate outbreak alerts based on disease and geographic location. This project will assess the timeliness and sensitivity of HealthMap based on outbreak posts from EpiCom, the Florida Department of Health’s disease outbreak and health incident alert network.

Objective

To assess the outbreak detection utility of HealthMap, a publically available event-based biosurveillance system utilizing various internet-based media resources to identify outbreaks, at the state and local level. Results may help determine whether HealthMap should be monitored more closely as a supplementary surveillance tool.

In 2012, Canada and other World Health Organization Member States endorsed the Rio Political Declaration on Social Determinants of Health, a global commitment to address health inequities by acting on the social, economic, environmental, and other factors that shape health. The Public Health Informatics team at KFL&A Public Health works on various surveillance projects to better support vulnerable populations, and prepare for emergency situations.

Objective

This roundtable will provide a hands-on workshop to learn about three surveillance systems developed and used by the Emergency Department Syndromic Surveillance Team at KFL&A Public Health. It will be an opportunity to address issues relevant to syndromic surveillance including: equity, emergency response, health preparedness, and health systems management. Additionally, participants will be able to apply new knowledge on improving health equity, and its relationship to social determinants of health, in their own jurisdictions.

The success of public health campaigns in decreasing or eliminating the burden of vaccine-preventable diseases can be undermined by media content influencing vaccine hesitancy in the population. A tool for tracking and describing the ever-growing platforms for such media content can help decide how and where to invest in campaigns to increase public confidence in vaccines. The Vaccine Sentimeter, developed from the Healthmap project, aims to assist public health practitioners in maintaining or improving vaccine coverage through a real-time, online visualization tool of global media content on vaccines.

Objective The current analysis describes the scope and trends in United States content from the Vaccine Sentimeter’s results, while seeking to examine any possible links between media content, vaccine coverage, and reported vaccine adverse events in the country.