About

HealthMap is a freely accessible, automated disease-surveillance platform. Created and maintained by an established global leader in utilizing online informal sources for disease outbreak monitoring, HealthMap delivers real-time intelligence on a broad range of emerging infectious diseases for a diverse audience including libraries, local health departments, governments, and international travelers.

History

HealthMap was founded in 2006, developed by a team of researchers, epidemiologists and software developers at Boston Children's Hospital. Following the 2002–2003 SARS outbreak, the need for a singular disease surveillance system that could aggregate online chatter and sources was apparent. In the years since, HealthMap has played a prominent early-detection role in several major outbreaks, flagging one of the earliest public signals of the 2009 H1N1 swine flu, and an automated HealthMap alert also picked up early reports of an unknown pneumonia cluster in Wuhan China in late 2019. Over its tenure, HealthMap has also supported early-alerting, surveillance, response and awareness for Ebola, Zika, COVID-19, and many other outbreaks.

How it works

HealthMap brings together disparate data sources, including online news aggregators, eyewitness reports, expert-curated discussions and validated official reports, to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. HealthMap uses natural language processing to automatically read online news and reports, figure out which disease and location each one is talking about, and sort them so outbreaks can be tracked in real time.

Through an automated process, updating 24/7/365, the system monitors, organizes, integrates, filters, visualizes and disseminates online information about emerging diseases in fifteen languages, facilitating early detection of global public health threats.

More Information

Landmark papers

• Brownstein JS, Freifeld CC, Reis BY, Mandl KD (2007) HealthMap: Internet-based emerging infectious disease intelligence. In: Institute of Medicine, editor. Infectious Disease Surveillance and Detection: Assessing the Challenges - Finding Solutions. Washington, DC. pp. 183-204.
• Brownstein JS, Freifeld CC, Reis BY, Mandl KD (2008) Surveillance Sans Frontières: Internet-Based Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence and the HealthMap Project. PLoS Med 5(7): e151
• Freifeld CC, Mandl KD, Reis BY, Brownstein JS (2007) HealthMap: Global infectious disease monitoring through automated classification and visualization of Internet media reports. J Am Med Inform Assoc.
• Brownstein JS, Freifeld CC (2007) HealthMap: the development of automated real-time internet surveillance for epidemic intelligence. Euro Surveill 12: E071129 071125.
• Brownstein JS, Freifeld CC, and Madoff LC (2009) Influenza A (H1N1) Virus, 2009 - Online Monitoring. New England Journal of Medicine
• Brownstein JS, Freifeld CC, and Madoff LC (2009) Digital Disease Detection — Harnessing the Web for Public Health Surveillance. New England Journal of Medicine
• John S. Brownstein, Ph.D., Clark C. Freifeld BS, Emily H. Chan, MS, Mikaela Keller, Ph.D., Amy L. Sonricker MPH, Sumiko R. Mekaru DVM MPVM, and David L. Buckeridge, M.D., Ph.D (2010) Information Technology and Global Surveillance of Cases of 2009 H1N1 Influenza. New England Journal of Medicine

To learn more about the team behind HealthMap, please visit our team website.