Getting in Front of Disease using Social Media Data and Search Data

Beat the bug before it becomes an epidemic

One of the worst fears in health care is not having enough product in the right locations when an outbreak occurs. What if we had newer and better ways to view outbreaks as they are happening, and reduce the possibility of massive epidemics? Drug manufacturers could have a head start boosting production and tweaking distribution, and be ready when the need for treatment is at its highest. Often, even a heads-up of a couple weeks could make a huge difference to large numbers of patients.

Where can we find the data that can be used for these predictions? Two sources are social media and Google searches. There are billions of data points to mine using predictive analytics programs.

Let's look a influenza. Google has a dedicated web site called Google Flu Trends, which tracks search verbiage, analyzes the context, and tallies the results geographically. For example, today, flu indicators are minimal in Argentina, and Australia, low in Hungary and Bulgaria, moderate in Spain and Germany, high in France, Scandinavia and Russia, and Intense in the U.S., Japan, and the Netherlands. This information can help the supply chain match their activities with global demand for treatments. You can drill down from the global perspective and view individual countries.

Two views of the current U.S. influenza situation

Other services look at social media posts. MappyHealth analyzes tweets and identifies health trends.

The CDC partners with Google and MappyHealth in an effort to obtain more accurate and more timely information than they have been able to obtain in the past.

HealthMap scans news websites, government alerts, and other data sources, aggregates the information, and provides stats and visualizations in real-time. They do a great job using Google Maps in their visualizations. They also have a mobile app called "Outbreaks Near Me."

HealthMap identifies diseases from 11 alert sources

There are more sources of data than ever, and better ways to crunch the data. The industry is utilizing Big Data and today's immense computing power to provide a better understanding of health, from a global perspective, all the way down to the local level. As analysis tools further improve, health care will have even more weapons against outbreaks and epidemics.

What do you think? Have you seen or used any other tools that provide useful information from social media and other data sources?