Why do we share so much personal information online? It was a good question for a panel talking about public health and big data, especially for Boston Children’s Hospital computational epidemiologist John Brownstein, a keynoter at the mHealth Summit this week. Whether it’s in the hope for support and empathy, or just a desire to share bad news, particularly from food poisoning, companies developing digital public health tools should be thankful. They’re trapping this treasure trove of data to create actionable insights for their users.
Brownstein highlighted several collaborations and projects by HealthMap at the conference. He is one of the architects of the initiative developed at Boston Children’s Hospital. Big data for public good was one of the emerging themes of the conference this year.
“We are just scratching the surface of tools that can support public health,” he said.
In one example, Brownstein highlighted its work with Yelp to collect reports on food poisoning to track foodborne illnesses — he pointed out there are an average of 10,000 cases each year. The great thing about food poisoning is that it’s something that someone would be likely to highlight in a restaurant review or tweet about as a warning to others. Its Outbreaks Near Me application uses iOS and Android apps to encourage people to report on outbreaks of a variety of illnesses. It signed up at least 100,000 volunteers to report on flu cases around them be they from work or friends so that outbreak areas can be identified and tracked.
In a joint project with the Centers for Disease Control it helped develop the BioMosaic program, most recently used to track migration from countries impacted by Ebola Virus to ensure expatriates and visitors had to access to public health resources in the U.S.
It adopted Google’s Flu Vaccine Finder and broadened it to help individuals locate places to get an appropriate vaccine near them. In a pilot with UberHealth, it used Uber cars to help nurses deliver flu vaccines to individuals at work and at home in New York City.
