[Clark Freifeld] HealthMap and MedWatcher: Big Data and Crowdsourcing for Better Public Health
HealthMap and MedWatcher: Big Data and Crowdsourcing for Better Public Health
Clark Freifeld
Research Software Developer
Boston Children’s Hospital
Abstract: Traditional public health monitoring and reporting systems are vital to protecting population health, but suffer from delays, under-reporting, and bureaucratic friction. Meanwhile, massive adoption of the Internet and connected mobile devices has created new capabilities for rapid, worldwide, many-to-many communication. In our research group at Harvard Medical School, we harness new media to improve public health surveillance, primarily in the areas of infectious disease and medication safety. Specifically, we have developed software tools to crawl the Internet for information from news media, governments, and social media. We then apply our customized natural language processing algorithms to filter and classify the data, to derive novel population health signals at scale. At the same time, we use crowdsourcing via Web and mobile platforms, to engage directly with the public, and create participatory epidemiology communities.
In our work on HealthMap, a global, multi-lingual, real-time outbreak monitoring system, we capture early signals of emerging and re-emerging diseases such as H1N1 influenza, MERS coronavirus, and Ebola virus, typically ahead of official sources. With the MedWatcher system, we tap into social media conversations on experiences with drugs, devices, and vaccines. We also engage patients in direct reporting through our MedWatcher app. Whereas an estimated nine out of ten adverse event experiences go unreported through traditional FDA reporting channels, with MedWatcher we are able to capture signals rapidly and provide a complementary view of safety information in real-time. Together, HealthMap and MedWatcher demonstrate the power of Internet media to improve public health.
Bio: Clark Freifeld is a Research Software Developer in the Computational Epidemiology Group in the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. He is co-creator of HealthMap, a multilingual real-time disease outbreak monitoring system. Clark has co-authored over 20 journal articles in the field of health informatics, including articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, PLOS Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. His research focuses on the application of machine learning and natural language processing to problems in real-time public health surveillance. He recently earned his PhD in biomedical engineering from Boston University; he also holds an MS from MIT, and a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from Yale University.