For more than two decades, CHIP has been pioneering in methods and approaches for modern biosurveillance, the continuous collection and analysis of population health data for public health intelligence. We helped create the discipline of syndromic surveillance and development of one of the first web-based biosurveillance systems, AEGIS deployed to dozens of hospitals in collaboration with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. CHIP also invented participatory surveillance and news and social media-based surveillance, and was an early innovator in postmarketing surveillance.
Projects
HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health.
The HealthMap team at CHIP was granted access to the Google Search API in order to model search data. Key initial projects are Healthmap Flu Trends. The project leverages the data from multiple data sources including: FluNearYou.org, athenahealth.com, Google Trends, and Google Flu API Trends, to produce estimates of flu. Next steps are development of an ensemble approach to improve accuracy. CHIP researchers are providing HealthMap Flu Trends to the CDC as a national surveillance data source.
VaccineFinder is a free, online service where users can search for locations that offer vaccinations. We work with partners such as clinics, pharmacies, and health departments to provide accurate and up-to-date information about vaccination services. VaccineFinder is a collaboration with Google and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Apple updated Apple Maps with COVID-19 vaccination locations from VaccineFinder. Facebook has partnered with VaccineFinder to connect users to COVID-19 vaccines. Amazon's Alexa is powered by data from VaccineFinder. VaccineFinder has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Fox Business, CNN, Forbes, NBC, CNBC, The New York Times, Becker's Health IT, and Fortune.
COVID Near You is a disease detection tool that uses crowdsourced data to visually map reports so that the general population can be informed about when COVID is in their areas.
Cumulus is a federally funded project to leverage to use cloud-hosted electronic health record “side cars” leveraging regulated open standards APIs to enable federation of data across all sites of care. By 2016, CHIP had implemented one of the world’s first HIPAA compliant cloud instances. AWS, Microsoft and Google have all implemented CHIP’s SMART/FHIR APIs in their products.
4CE is an international consortium for electronic health record data-driven studies of the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this effort—led by the i2b2 international academics users group—is to inform doctors, epidemiologists and the public about COVID-19 patients with data acquired through the health care process.
Thousands of individuals submit weekly health reports to benefit their community and track the flu. It's the power of the crowd captured for public health surveillance.
In the LIMIT JIA study, CHIP leads informatics efforts to develop computable phenotypes and implement data-driven approaches to improve enrollment for this trial, which is the first clinical trial to address prevention of disease advancement in oligo-articular Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis, the most common type of JIA. LIMIT JIA is a phase III randomized clinical trial evaluating the effectiveness of 6 months of treatment with abatacept plus usual care verses usual care to prevent extension of disease in subjects with recent onset, limited juvenile idiopathic arthritis. For this trial, we develop and implement new informatics approaches to rapidly identify potentially eligible subjects and to optimize data completeness of enrolled subjects, linking electronic health record data with the CARRA Registry.
CHIP faculty research the epidemics dynamics of police violence in the United States.
