With the goals of identifying and mapping pandemic outbreaks and better targeting vaccines, IBM has announced extensive participation with public health groups in a global pandemic initiative. The initiative will engage the open source community and build a community of users. In announcing the plans IBM explains in part :
Central to the effort will be the use of advanced software technologies, elements of which IBM intends to contribute to the open-source community, that are designed to help share information on disease outbreaks electronically and use it to predict how diseases will spread.Among the technologies that will be used is a software framework IBM developed to allow electronic health information to be more easily shared and mined for trends, such as the outbreak of disease. Called the Interoperable Healthcare Information Infrastructure (IHII), the technology is designed to improve communication and collaboration among medical professionals and researchers by helping them collect and share health data. IBM will expand the role of IHII to include public health issues, responding to global calls for pandemic preparedness by facilitating the sharing of clinical data among medical facilities, laboratories and public health agencies.
IBM also plans to build a community of users around its epidemiological modeling framework, called Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeller (STEM), which can tap the information collected from IHII, along with additional information such as roadmaps, airport locations, travel patterns, and bird migration routes around the world. It will allow users to rapidly develop models for how a disease is likely to geographically spread over time. These models can help public health experts and governmental planners develop more effective preparedness plans.
