HealthMap: Knowledge Management for Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence

描述（由申请人提供）： 尽管许多发达国家加强了其传统的临床监测能力，但发展中世界的许多地区，包括最容易受到新出现的健康威胁的地区，仍然缺乏基本的卫生信息基础设施。为了帮助填补这一空白，电子新闻媒体、疾病报告网络、讨论网站和博客被证明是新一代跨国界运作的公共卫生监测系统的宝贵数据来源--几乎世卫组织调查的所有重大疫情，包括SARS，都是首先通过这些非正式的在线来源确定的。这些数据来源提供了关于世界各地疾病暴发和相关事件的当地和及时信息，包括由于缺乏基础设施或政治压制信息而对日常全球公共卫生工作相对不可见的领域。然而，由于这些信息分散，而且基本上没有结构，各来源之间缺乏组织和整合，无法从全球角度看待所有正在发生的疾病威胁。为了构建这样一个关于当前新出现感染的综合视图，我们部署了一个名为“健康地图”的早期原型，这是一个免费提供的多流实时知识管理系统，可以汇总和映射众多关键数据源的健康警报，包括世卫组织警报、新闻专线、邮件列表。利用我们以前的国家医学图书馆资助的实时健康监测工作;我们建议广泛开发这种新的数字资源，以解决实现全球健康综合，全面和定制视图的技术和方法障碍。健康地图开发的主要目标是提供最广泛的地理区域和疾病病原体的最大数量的可能有用的信息，而不使用户因过多的信息而不堪重负，也不使重要和紧迫的要素模糊不清。我们将专门解决为非结构化数据提供结构的挑战，同时仍然使精明的用户能够注意到可能是重大爆发的早期迹象的微妙模式。健康地图的绘制将沿着监测的四个关键组成部分进行：（1）数据采集（评价和综合多种电子来源）（2）信息特征（疾病和位置分类以及非结构化数据的严重性评级），（3）信号解释（多流信号检测，时空建模和风险评估）和（4）知识传播（分层传播全球传染病警报和灵活的数据可视化工具）。在每个领域，我们都将对现有原型进行关键增强。我们计划进行严格的评估，以确保健康地图成功地利用电子资源进行监测，沟通和干预。我们还将进行全面的用户测试，可用性研究，用户行为分析作为我们努力的一部分。我们的目标是使健康地图成为为公众和公共卫生决策者量身定制的重要知识资源。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Even as many developed countries strengthen their traditional clinically-based surveillance capacity, a basic level of health information infrastructure is still lacking in many parts of the developing world, including areas that are most vulnerable to emerging health threats. To help fill this gap, electronic news outlets, disease reporting networks, discussion sites, and blogs are proving to be invaluable data sources for a new generation of public health surveillance systems that operate across international borders- almost all major outbreaks investigated by WHO, including SARS, are first identified by these informal online sources. These data sources provide local and timely information about disease outbreaks and related events around the world, including areas relatively invisible to day-to-day global public health efforts due to lack of infrastructure or political suppression of information. However, since this information is dispersed and largely unstructured, there is lack of organization and integration between sources, precluding a global view of all ongoing disease threats. In order to construct such an integrated view of current emerging infections, we deployed an early prototype called Health Map, a freely available multi-stream real-time knowledge management system that aggregates and maps health alerts across numerous key data sources, including WHO alerts, newswires, mailing lists. Leveraging our previous National Library of Medicine funded work in real-time health monitoring; we propose extensive development of this new digital resource to address technological and methodological barriers to achieving a synthesized, comprehensive, and customized view of global health. The principal objective of Health Map development is to provide access to the greatest amount of possibly useful information across the widest variety of geographical areas and disease agents, without overwhelming the user with an excess of information, or obscuring important and urgent elements. We will specifically address the challenge of providing structure to unstructured data while still enabling the astute user to notice the subtle pattern that could be an early indication of a significant outbreak. Development of Health Map will proceed along the four key components of surveillance: (1) data acquisition (evaluation and integration of multiple electronic sources) (2) information characterization (disease and location categorization and severity rating of unstructured data), (3) signal interpretation (multi-stream signal detection, spatiotemporal modeling and risk assessment) and (4) knowledge dissemination (tiered dissemination of global infectious disease alerts and flexible data visualization tools). In each area, we will make critical enhancements to the existing prototype. We plan rigorous evaluation to ensure that Health Map successfully leverages electronic sources for surveillance, communication, and intervention. We will also conduct comprehensive user testing, usability studies, user behavior analysis as part of our effort. Our goal is to make Health Map a vital knowledge resource tailored for both the general public and public health decision-makers.