Healthmap, which is targeted at public health officials and international travelers, integrates outbreak data ranging from news sources such as Google News, personal accounts, and official alerts from the World Health Organization.
The website uses an automated processing system that aggregates data by disease and displays it by location. The map is continually updated, plotting the spread of disease. Users can filter the information by disease, country and health news source.
Healthmap works by a computer program that scans text from RSS news feeds to find out information about a disease and where it was reported. Google Maps is used to place icons at the sites of individual disease reports.
Healthmap was created by Clark Freifeld, a research software developer at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program, and John Brownstein, an instructor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
