A Sampling of Systems
Within a year of CERN making World Wide Web technology public, ideas for systems that would capitalise on this new wealth of information for public health intelligence began to pop up. This ushered in a new era for event-based surveillance, allowing us to tap into huge amounts of varied information quickly and build systems that would help collect and filter the information to facilitate the manual detection of unusual events. In this interactive panel session, we will hear from a sampling of the pioneers of these systems, learn about their developments to date, their plans moving forward, and how we can work together as one community to capitalise on different systems strengths and find solutions for the gaps.
ProMED and the early detection of emerging disease outbreaks: the first 25 years
Larry Madoff, Editor, ProMed/International Society for Infectious Diseases
ProMed launched in 1994 as an Internet-based service to provide information related to unusual health events, particularly those related to emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. Since then, ProMed has grown into the largest publicly-available system reporting on infectious disease outbreaks and is used by public health leaders, government officials, researchers, healthcare workers, and the general public around the world. This presentation describes the evolution of ProMed including challenges overcome and directions for the future.
Global Public Health Intelligence Network
Florence Tanguay, Senior Epidemiologist for Emergency Preparedness and Response, Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC)
The Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) supports Canada, EIOS and other countries with event-based surveillance for early detection, assessment and reporting of emerging public health threats worldwide. GPHIN consists of a team of highly educated, multilingual analysts utilizing a web-based application to scan, filter and assess open-source information from around the world in nine languages. The future for the GPHIN platform involves lessening time spent scanning and filtering and more time providing analysis to planners and decision-makers. The GPHIN tool was recently updated with cutting-edge technology features including machine learning and natural language processing.
HealthMap: Infectious Disease Surveillance using Online Data; Ongoing and Future Initiatives
Kara Sewalk, Project Manager for HealthMap, Boston's Children's Hospital
HealthMap is a unique online platform providing 24/7 updated information on disease information by location through an easy to use interface that is freely available through its website. By bringing together unique sources to create a cohesive and comprehensive view of the current state of infectious diseases, HealthMap provides support for transparency in disease outbreak monitoring and real-time surveillance of emerging global health threats. This presentation describes some of the current work being done by the HealthMap team and identifies future opportunities and research areas.
How can an NGO support the information collection and sharing?
Csaba Kovacs, CEO, National Association of Radio Distress-Signalling and Infocommunications (RSOE)
The RSOE's Emergency and Disaster Information Service (RSOE-EDIS) started informing the world 15 years ago. For more than a decade, it has been collecting and sharing extremely large amounts of information about natural and human made disasters and catastrophes based on open source information, using the advantages of the Internet. The service is now 15 years old and needs to be renewed with new services and technologies. RSOE's goal is to keep on providing timely and accurate information to people and organisations like WHO and started a number of new developments towards this objective.