Epidemics
Schuemie MJ et al, Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety, 2012
PURPOSE:
Increasingly, patient information is stored in electronic medical records, which could be reused for research. Often these records comprise unstructured narrative data, which are cumbersome to analyze. The authors investigated whether text mining can make these data suitable for epidemiological studies and compared a concept recognition approach and a range of machine learning techniques that require a manually annotated training set. The authors show how this training set can be created with minimal effort by using a broad database query.
[ More ]
26 January 2012 | No Comments »
Categories: Science | EHR: EHR | Tag(s): Epidemics, Free text, Narrative
Kate Freeman, Mashable
“Health providers have suspected for some time that social media might be an early indicator of an epidemic. Now they have proof.
[ More ]
11 January 2012 | No Comments »
Categories: News | Country: Haiti | Tag(s): Epidemics, Social Media, Twitter
Daniela Hirschfeld, SciDev Net
“The informal information source, Twitter, was yielding data that would have been a quicker way of detecting and tracking the deadly cholera outbreak in Haiti than traditional methods, according to a study.
[ More ]
10 January 2012 | No Comments »
Categories: News | Country: Haiti | Tag(s): Epidemics, Social Media, Tracking, Twitter
Chunara R et al, The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 86(1)
During infectious disease outbreaks, data collected through health institutions and official reporting structures may not be available for weeks, hindering early epidemiologic assessment. By contrast, data from informal media are typically available in near real-time and could provide earlier estimates of epidemic dynamics. We assessed correlation of volume of cholera-related HealthMap news media reports, Twitter postings, and government cholera cases reported in the first 100 days of the 2010 Haitian cholera outbreak.
[ More ]
10 January 2012 | No Comments »
Categories: Science | Country: Haiti | Tag(s): Epidemics, Social Media, Twitter
Faye Flam, Philly.com
“As a biologist and computer scientist, Pennsylvania State University’s Marcel Salathe studies the viral spread of information and the spread of real viruses.
[ More ]
23 November 2011 | No Comments »
Categories: News | Country: United States | Tag(s): Disease Surveillance, Epidemics, Social Media, Twitter, Vaccine
Sarah Kessler, Mashable
“When the first cases of swine flu were detected in the spring of 2009, Twitter helped to inflame the panic that spread well ahead of the disease. The idea that anything useful could be mined from the flood of tweets reacting to the nascent threat was widely dismissed.
[ More ]
19 October 2011 | No Comments »
Categories: News | Country: United States | Tag(s): Disease Surveillance, Epidemics, Social Media, Tracking, Twitter
Debora MacKenzie, NewScientist
“The northern hemisphere’s flu season will soon be here. If you are getting vaccinated and tweet it, will your followers follow you to the doctor’s surgery – or are they the sort of people who have an appointment booked already?
[ More ]
18 October 2011 | No Comments »
Categories: News | Country: United States | Tag(s): Epidemics, Social Media, Twitter
Jordan Calmes, NPR
“Twitter may turn out to be a great tool for tracking epidemics and how people deal with them.
[ More ]
16 October 2011 | No Comments »
Categories: News | Country: United States | Tag(s): Epidemics, Tracking, Twitter
Christopher Joyce, NPR
“The year 2010 was a very bad one for Haiti. It started with an earthquake that killed over 300,000 people, mostly in the crowded capital of Port-au-Prince. After that, cholera originating in a U.N. camp broke out in a northern province and eventually spread to the city.
[ More ]
31 August 2011 | No Comments »
Categories: News | Tag(s): Cellphone, Epidemics
Freifeld CC et al, PLoS Med, 7(12)
- Traditional health systems serve a key role in protecting populations, but are typically hierarchical, and information often travels slowly.
- Novel Internet-based collaborative systems can have an important role in gathering information quickly and improving coverage and accessibility.
[ More ]
8 December 2010 | No Comments »
Categories: Science | Tag(s): Cellphone, Epidemics, participatory, Public Health, Reporting
Jon Hoeksma, e-Health Europe
“Work on developing Swine flu surveys over mobile phone by Telefónica Mexico and German firm Myriad Group AG, has been shortlisted for ‘messaging application or service: social use’ at the 2010 Global Messaging Awards.
[ More ]
25 June 2010 | No Comments »
Categories: News | Country: Mexico | Tag(s): Applications, Epidemics, mHealth
Brownstein JS et al, N Engl J Med, 362(18)
The widespread adoption of increasingly sophisticated forms of information technology has paralleled the increase in rapid and far-reaching international travel. The emergence and global spread of the 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) virus illustrated not only the hazards of an interconnected world, but also the powerful role of new methods for detecting, tracking, and responding to infectious diseases.
[ More ]
6 May 2010 | No Comments »
Categories: Science | Country: United States | Tag(s): Disease Surveillance, Epidemics, Information Technology, Internet
Glenn Laffel, EHR Bloggers
“De-identified patient data is health information from a medical record that has been stripped of all “direct identifiers”—that is, all information that can be used to identify the patient from whose medical record the health information was derived.
[ More ]
30 April 2010 | No Comments »
Categories: News | Country: United States | EHR: EHR, EHR USA | Tag(s): Adverse Events, De-identification, Epidemics, Research
Biogeekblog
“Monitorer le web est utile dans de nombreux domaines, comme celui de la surveillance de l’état de santé des populations et la détection de nouvelles menaces sanitaires, c’est le domaine de l’épidémiologie.
[ More ]
14 April 2010 | No Comments »
Categories: News | Tag(s): Epidemics, Open Source, Twitter
Kostkova P et al, ECCMID, 2010
Aims and objectives:
The use of user-generated content in Web 2.0 tools for predicting outbreaks has been seen as a great potential, however, the recent swine flu outbreak in April-May 2009 truly demonstrated the potential of these media for early warning systems. Web 2.0 has generated a great interest recently as a possible media for early warning system for outbreak detection and epidemic intelligence (EI). Traditional systems such as GPHIN, Medisys are well established and used by ECDC and WHO on a daily bases, however, there has been recent interest in the ability to estimate flu activity via aggregating online search queries for keywords relating to flu and its symptoms by commercial companies like Google. However, the search data remain proprietary and therefore not useful for research. The increase in user generated content on the web via social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter, however, provides researchers with a highly accessible view into people’s online and offline activity.
[ More ]
14 April 2010 | No Comments »
Categories: Science | Tag(s): Epidemics, facebook, social-network, Twitter, Web 2.0
Ochieng' Ogodo, SciDev.net
“Mobile phone software that allows scientists to send, retrieve and map data from remote areas could benefit scientists in developing countries, but some barriers must be overcome first, a study finds.
[ More ]
1 October 2009 | No Comments »
Categories: News | Tag(s): Developing Countries, Epidemics, smartphone
Heather Hayes, Government Health IT
“Maryland will have a statewide early warning system in place this fall as it attempts to stay abreast of the swine flu threat and other public health concerns.
[ More ]
15 September 2009 | No Comments »
Categories: News | Country: United States | Tag(s): De-identification, Disease Surveillance, Epidemics, Hospitals, pharmacist
Jeff Blander, SciDev Net
“Globally, just ten per cent of medical research and discovery budgets target the 80 per cent of people who live on less than US$10 a day.
[ More ]
22 July 2009 | No Comments »
Categories: News | Tag(s): Biomedicine, Chronic Diseases, Developing Countries, Drugs, Epidemics, Health Information Technology, Healthcare Technology, Infectious Diseases, Research
John G. Bartlett, Medscape Today
“Early detection and a rapid response to seasonal and pandemic influenzas can improve outcomes and slow the spread of both.
[ More ]
17 July 2009 | No Comments »
Categories: News | Country: United States | Tag(s): Disease Surveillance, Epidemics, Internet, Search
Chris Thorman, The Healthcare IT Guy, 10 July 2009
“The combination of Twitter and epidemiology presents an interesting opportunity: What if doctors twittered about symptoms they observed and diagnoses they made?
[ More ]
10 July 2009 | No Comments »
Categories: News | Country: United States | Tag(s): emr, Epidemics, Social Media, Twitter
