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以临床为基础的监测能力，但发展中世界许多地区仍然缺乏基本水平的卫生信息基础设施，包括最容易受到新出现的健康威胁的地区。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跨国界运作的新一代公共卫生监测系统的宝贵数据来源--世卫组织调查的几乎所有重大疫情，包括SARS，都是由这些非正式的在线来源首先确定的。这些数据来源提供有关世界各地疾病暴发和相关事件的当地及时信息，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看不到的地区。然而，由于这些信息分散且在很大程度上是非结构化的，缺乏来源之间的组织和整合，排除了对所有正在进行的疾病威胁的全球视角。为了构建对当前新出现的感染的这种综合视图，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，它汇集和绘制了许多关键数据源的健康警报，包括世卫组织警报、通讯社、邮件列表。利用我们之前由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一新的数字资源，以解决实现全面、全面和定制的全球健康观点的技术和方法障碍。开发健康地图的主要目标是在最广泛的地理区域和疾病病原体范围内提供最大量可能有用的信息，而不会向用户提供过多的信息，或掩盖重要和紧迫的要素。我们将具体解决为非结构化数据提供结构的挑战，同时仍使敏锐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。健康地图的编制将沿着监测的四个关键组成部分进行：(1)数据获取(多个电子来源的评估和整合)(2)信息表征(疾病和地点分类以及非结构化数据的严重程度评级)，(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(分级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，我们都将对现有的原型进行关键的改进。我们计划进行严格的评估，以确保Health Map成功地利用电子资源进行监测、通信和干预。作为努力的一部分，我们还将进行全面的用户测试、可用性研究和用户行为分析。我们的目标是使健康地图成为为普通公众和公共卫生决策者量身定做的重要知识资源。

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.