Public Health Surveillance – John Brownstein | Boston Children’s Hospital

Talk – Public Health Surveillance

Speaker Bio – John Brownstein – Director Computational Epidemiology Group | Center for Biomedical Informatics, Boston Children’s Hospital

Can we improve the health of our population with text analytics? This seems like a curious proposition, as it obviously avoids the cornerstones of healthy living, i.e. diet and exercise. However, this idea is the cornerstone of our research – can we mine large volumes of text data to observe the current health of our population, discover adverse drug interactions before they have broad health impacts, monitor outbreaks of serious diseases, and even predict the emergence of the next infectious disease in order to prevent it from spreading?

In this talk, I’ll be outlining the work we’ve done with HealthMap.org, a system for monitoring disease outbreak and providing real-time surveillance of emerging public health threats, used by over a million people a year including the CDC, WHO, DHS, DOD, HHS, and EU. And I’ll also discuss MedWatcher.org, a mobile app for tracking and reporting side effects of drugs, vaccines and medical devices.