Health and Disease Information for the Public Made Useful by Being Hyperlocal
Original thoughts posted last night on http://chiah.posterous.com/, edited and reposted here.
There's been a lot of talk about making the online experience hyperlocal, location based services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite are hot, Facebook, Twitter, Google are all rolling out geolocation features. All of these technologies are available, there's already questions being asked (here and here) in the blogosphere, "How can we use location based services for health?"
Didn't have a good answer for location and healthcare- until now. It's not the same kind of thinking that other people have been thinking about with a "location based service", but it is important to have a bounded area and a community.
I asked via Twitter if there's information out there that would tell me what kinds of communicable diseases are being diagnosed around me because it would be useful information to have. Started thinking about this because I had a fever of unknown origin this past weekend and the symptoms were general- low grade fever, headache, slight weakness, tiny bit of a dry cough- but there was not a good way to know what the likelihood of each possible virus/bacteria/other is.
In an effort to figure out what diseases was going around, I did a quick little search and turned up an article that there's a 6X increase in whooping cough in the Bay Area and I started thinking, why isn't there a site that lets you search instances of diagnosed cases of communicable diseases based on location. It wouldn't need to be very granular, anything within a 25-50 mile radius of a location that a user specifies would be sufficient.
Here's the argument that I have for providing this information on a website:
- Public can use it to see what diseases are prevalent or becoming so and make wise decisions, like avoiding large parties when there's an outbreak of flu.
- Clinicians could use this information in narrowing down disease possibilities.
- Public health agencies could get in front of a pandemic.
If we just started with one semi-large local healthcare organization already using electronic health records (EHR's) that would be willing to put out anonymized data with numbers of cases of communicable diseases seen in one of the larger clinics, it would give the community insight into how to keep themselves healthier. Another idea is to take the diseases that are already being tracked by local public health agencies and making those numbers more public. Using the press to get information out seems like an inefficient and haphazard way to let all members of a community (caregivers and the public) know about an outbreak, it would make a lot more sense to make this information more accessible. This way, I can manage my risk by avoiding places or behaviors that up my likelihood of contracting a disease known to be occurring and allow me to make more intelligent decisions regarding care should I become ill.
Forget mining Google searches for flu, let's go with a much more solid number of "How many people were diagnosed with flu in your neighborhood?" Why shouldn't health be hyperlocal?
