About HealthMap

HealthMap In the News:


About HealthMap

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.



HealthMap Publications


HealthMap Presentations


Georeferencing Workshop at Harvard, March 21st 2008. View John's presentation in video format.
Forum One event Global Health and the Internet: How Can We Save More Lives? on Tuesday, November 13th 2007 (slides).
Institute of Medicine's workshop on Infectious Disease Surveillance and Detection December 12 - 13, 2006. View slides from John's presentation, in PDF format.

Job Opportunities

Over the next year, we will be looking to expand the HealthMap team. We are currently hiring for a programmer position with expertise in PHP and Web design and an interest in public health. We are also seeking help from those with multi-lingual abilities and expertise in epidemiology and/or public health. Please let us know if you have interest in helping out in any capacity.

HealthMap Visualization

    Heat Index: Low                        High
  • Marker color represents a composite score based on the recency of alerts, the number of disease outbreaks, and the number of sources providing information at a particular location. Our algorithm applies an exponential weighting, yielding increased heat (redness) for more recent outbreak news.
  • The source of the alert is represented by an icon next to the alert headline.
  • The square-shaped marker icon indicates a country-level marker, while state, province and local markers are round . We currently have administrative divisions and some major cities for USA, UK, Canada, China, India, Australia, Mexico and Russia, with more coming soon.


Sources

HealthMap is possible thanks to freely available information from the following sources. Use of their logos or trademarks by HealthMap is intended only to refer specifically to the respective service; it does not imply any endorsement or affiliation.


Software Tools

HealthMap is a Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP application and relies on the following open products. Special thanks to their authors. HealthMap also uses Fisher-Robinson Bayesian filtering, as described by Gary Robinson in A Statistical Approach to the Spam Problem.


Who is HealthMap

HealthMap was created by Clark Freifeld and John Brownstein. If you find it useful or interesting, we would love to hear from you. Please email us with your comments, questions and suggestions:

  • clark.freifeld AT childrens.harvard.edu
  • john.brownstein AT childrens.harvard.edu


Clark Freifeld is a Research Software Developer at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program. He studied Computer Science and Mathematics at Yale University, and has over seven years of experience developing feature-rich Web applications. His interests include Web-based user-interface design, data visualization, text mining, and technologies for developing countries.


John Brownstein, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and has joint appointments in the Children's Hospital Boston Informatics Program and Division of Emergency Medicine. He was trained as an epidemiologist in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University where he received his PhD. Dr. Brownstein works on novel statistical modeling and medical informatics approaches for accelerating the translation of public health surveillance research into practice.


HealthMap Team
  • Mikaela Keller, PhD is a computer scientist specialized in statistical machine learning. She has worked particularly in developing approaches to enrich text representations by incorporating knowledge gained across large unlabeled textual data sets. Before joining CHIP as a Research Fellow, she was a PhD candidate at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, as well as a Research Assistant at IDIAP Research Institute.
  • Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, Director of the Intelligent Health Lab at CHIP and co-director of the PHIConnect CDC Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics.
  • Ben Reis, MEng, PhD is a member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School and at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology. Dr. Reis holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where he attended as a Marshall Scholar. He completed his postgraduate training at Harvard Medical School, where he held an NIH Fellowship in Health Informatics.
  • Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, Director of Children's Hospital Informatics Program and Harvard Medical School's Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics program.