|  | Excerpt from: Globally AWhere
| | | December 21, 2008 | | Geo-analytics provides unique benefits to the people on the front lines of any time-critical health situation. | Resource deployment is critical for many organizations, but possibly never more so than during a health crisis. Health care organizations face crises where a quick, accurately targeted response is crucial. Location intelligence can streamline this process, providing a visual outlook on current situations, prioritized needs, the current location of resources and even information on distribution infrastructure.
As an example, weather forecasts can indicate increases in mosquito breeding that typically portend a malaria outbreak. Using geo-analytics, people from interdependent health care organizations (national governments, aid agencies, local hospitals, private companies) can quickly see where current medical supplies are located in relation to the areas that will likely need them in the near future, in anticipation of the malaria outbreak. Armed with that information, supplies can more quickly and intuitively be directed where they will be most needed.
In another scenario, imagine a bird flu outbreak that may have originated in Singapore. However, various governments are slow to report the facts of the disease’s spread to other regions. As people begin writing about it on the Internet, the distributed communications can be mapped, typically through IP addresses, which are location sensitive. Armed with this information, global health teams can be deployed, travel advisories issued and other appropriate actions taken in the critical time period before the outbreak becomes incredibly widespread, helping the general public without relying on the delayes associated with government bureaucracy.
Google Flu Trends is an interesting service that begins to offer a small sub-section of these services. Google discovered that key phrases are used during online searches for health information. By compiling these phrases, Google discovered a pattern.
We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how may people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.
This type of information-density pattern, with its dependency upon location, begs for mapping technology to clearly show the data in the specific regions. We think GFT would benefit from integrating geo-analytics to its sociological study of flu-related search terms.
Beyond the immediate benefits (saving lives, in this case), we recognize many types of secondary positive outcomes.
- A psychological lift for the health workers who experience first-hand the greater impact in more distributed organizations improves their esteem, and encourages more leadership.
- A stronger sense of community is developed when people experience the effectiveness at the hospital and testimonials circulate through the region.
Working with the United Nations Foundation, we are developing a rich web-based solution that integrates and correlates data from many different organizations, and provides health organizations with access to near-real-time information that often lags in the current system by 3 – 24 months.
Although the global health community is one of many that we serve, the benefits of implementations like these are applicable to a wide host of problems. What's the next impact of the global financial crisis, and how might geo-analytics help you take the most effective actions in response?
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