HealthMap seems to be getting more and more press recently including an excellent article co-authored by a co-founder John Brownstein, PhD.
If you are unfamiliar with the project or would like more information on it, I would recommend you review the article in the July issue of PLoS Medicine. Basically, HealthMap is a Health 2,0 Mash Up that extracts, categorizes, filters and integrates a variety of Web-based data sources, including blogs, listservs, chatrooms, and online news reports.
“It’s a disease-mining system that uses the Internet to look for outbreaks going on around the world, bringing all this information together in one view,” explains John Brownstein, PhD, co-founder of HealthMap and an assistant professor at the Informatics Program (CHIP) at Children’s Hospital Boston.
The summary points of the article include:
- Valuable information about infectious diseases is found in Web-accessible information sources such as discussion forums, mailing lists, government Web sites, and news outlets.
- Web-based electronic information sources can play an important role in early event detection and support situational awareness by providing current, highly local information about outbreaks, even from areas relatively invisible to traditional global public health efforts.
- While these sources are potentially useful, information overload and difficulties in distinguishing “signal from noise” pose substantial barriers to fully utilizing this information.
- HealthMap is a freely accessible, automated real-time system that monitors, organizes, integrates, filters, visualizes, and disseminates online information about emerging diseases.
- The goal of HealthMap is to deliver real-time intelligence on a broad range of emerging infectious diseases for a diverse audience, from public health officials to international travelers.
- Ultimately, the use of news media and other nontraditional sources of surveillance data can facilitate early outbreak detection, increase public awareness of disease outbreaks prior to their formal recognition, and provide an integrated and contextualized view of global health information.
The article and the project are great examples of the potential and opportunities presented by open data sources and the article even points to this as both a challenge and an opportunity for the future.
You can find the full article a: PLoS Medicine
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