ESM Research

When the power of Google is combined with the authority of the NLM, the CDC, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the DoD’s Global Emerging Infections System (among others), and the intellectual might of MIT and Harvard researchers, what you get is HealthMap.org:

HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.

Health issues in the new, ‘2.0′ (for lack of a better term) technology-driven environment are an interesting thing, but not studied enough. I came across this article, from the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) via Pubmed:

HealthMap: global infectious disease monitoring through automated classification and visualization of Internet media reports.

Freifeld CC, Mandl KD, Reis BY, Brownstein JS.

Children’s Hospital Informatics Program, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, 300 Longwood Ave., Boston, MA 02115, USA. clark.freifeld@childrens.harvard.edu

OBJECTIVE: Unstructured electronic information sources, such as news reports, are proving to be valuable inputs for public health surveillance. However, staying abreast of current disease outbreaks requires scouring a continually growing number of disparate news sources and alert services, resulting in information overload. Our objective is to address this challenge through the HealthMap.org Web application, an automated system for querying, filtering, integrating and visualizing unstructured reports on disease outbreaks. DESIGN: This report describes the design principles, software architecture and implementation of HealthMap and discusses key challenges and future plans. MEASUREMENTS: We describe the process by which HealthMap collects and integrates outbreak data from a variety of sources, including news media (e.g., Google News), expert-curated accounts (e.g., ProMED Mail), and validated official alerts. Through the use of text processing algorithms, the system classifies alerts by location and disease and then overlays them on an interactive geographic map. We measure the accuracy of the classification algorithms based on the level of human curation necessary to correct misclassifications, and examine geographic coverage. RESULTS: As part of the evaluation of the system, we analyzed 778 reports with HealthMap, representing 87 disease categories and 89 countries. The automated classifier performed with 84% accuracy, demonstrating significant usefulness in managing the large volume of information processed by the system. Accuracy for ProMED alerts is 91% compared to Google News reports at 81%, as ProMED messages follow a more regular structure. CONCLUSION: HealthMap is a useful free and open resource employing text-processing algorithms to identify important disease outbreak information through a user-friendly interface.

And this article, from PLoS Medicine:

Surveillance Sans Frontières: Internet-Based Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence and the HealthMap Project

John S Brownstein,^* Clark C Freifeld, Ben Y Reis, and Kenneth D Mandl

As developed nations continue to strengthen their electronic disease surveillance capacities [1], the parts of the world that are most vulnerable to emerging disease threats still lack essential public health information infrastructure [2,3]. The existing network of traditional surveillance efforts managed by health ministries, public health institutes, multinational agencies, and laboratory and institutional networks has wide gaps in geographic coverage and often suffers from poor and sometimes suppressed information flow across national borders [4]. At the same time, an enormous amount of valuable information about infectious diseases is found in Web-accessible information sources such as discussion sites, disease reporting networks, and news outlets [5,6,7]. These resources can support situational awareness by providing current, highly local information about outbreaks, even from areas relatively invisible to traditional global public health efforts [8]. These data are plagued by a number of potential hazards that must be studied in depth, including false reports (mis- or disinformation) and reporting bias. Yet these data hold tremendous potential to initiate epidemiologic follow-up studies and provide complementary epidemic intelligence context to traditional surveillance sources. This potential is already being realized, as a majority of outbreak verifications currently conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO)’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network are triggered by reports from these nontraditional sources [5,6].

Because the field of Emergency Services Management is so new, diverse and inter-disciplinary, I employ a number of techniques to make ‘keeping up’ in the field manageable.* One of them is setting up “Journal Alerts” in databases for the journals that I know are most relevant to the field. This is an easy way to get the titles and abstracts delivered to my email inbox or RSS reader every time a new issue is published.

The journals that I try to read in this field are:

–International Journal of Emergency Management
–Journal of Emergency Management
–Natural Hazards Review
–Futures Research Quarterly
–Disaster Prevention and Management
–International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters
–Journal of Business Continuity and Emergency Planning
–Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management

Over the course of the next few Thursdays, I’ll be reviewing these journals, and giving instructions for signing up for alerts for each. If you know of a journal the library should subscribe to in this field, let me know!

(*) If you think you have it bad with this subject, imagine how much reading I have to do to stay current in all the fields I support (ESM/Disaster Science, HRM, Information Systems, Liberal Arts, and Teacher Licensure) and my very own Library & Information Science field…