Public Health Research - overview
The negative impact of infectious and food borne disease on society has the potential to be considerably greater than in decades past due to the growing interdependence among nations of the world. In the absence of worldwide public health standards-based networks, the ability to monitor and respond quickly to such outbreaks is limited. IBM Research is working on systems to enable the sharing of data generated at clinical and public health institutions across proprietary systems and political boundaries as well as advanced analysis tools to visualize population health, detect outbreaks, determine the evolutionary patterns of disease and perform forecast modeling.
The Public Health Research Project is part of a larger IBM Research Effort in Healthcare and includes colleagues in Haifa, Watson, Software Group, and GBS. We are focused on creating open source tools, technologies, and standards for electronic health records, public health reporting, and analytics.
Our projects include:
- Accelerated Outbreak Detection: Advanced modeling and tooling aimed at reducing the time from when the first case of illness is reported until the contamination source is identified.
- Genomic Surveillance
- Epidemiological Modeling(STEM): Open source platform for geo-spatial disease and event modeling
- Public Health Case Reports: Standard-based electronic document for reporting disese incidence to public health authorities