Open-Source Initiative Targets Bird Flu
IBM and over 20 major worldwide public health institutions, including the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced the Global Pandemic Initiative, a collaborative effort to help stem the spread of infectious diseases.
As part of the initiative, IBM said it would contribute several of its key software technologies to the open source community and establish healthcare "Innovation Centres" at the company's worldwide Research laboratories to work with the global healthcare community in this collaborative effort.
"The threat of a pandemic is a definitely global phenomenon," said Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "Our response must be similarly global, and must rely - as with so many other major issues we face today - on open, collaborative innovation. IBM is proud to join with our partners in this effort, grounded in our core value of 'innovation that matters.'"
Some of the software used in this initiative will allow electronic health information to be more easily shared and mined for trends about outbreaks and how disease could spread. 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 also plans to build an open-source community dedicated to using epidemiology tools to rapidly develop models about how disease might spread from place to place. The STEM (Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeler) is designed to tap into information from IHII and other data sources like roadmaps, transportation infrastructure and animal migration patterns. The models could then be used in preparedness plans such as vaccine distribution.
source: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/19640.wss
