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IBM and Eclipse Join Forces to Track Health Crises, Infectious Diseases

IBM has announced that it has made available to the open source community its advanced software technology that can help predict the transmission of diseases across countries. Called the Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM), the software has been developed on top of Eclipse, and is now available for use through the Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework Project (OHF).

The technology is designed to enable the rapid creation of epidemiological models for how an infectious disease, such as avian influenza or dengue fever, is likely to geographically spread over time. STEM, which runs on any operating system, creates a graphical representation of the spread of a disease based on a variety of parameters such as population, geographic and macro-economic data, roadmaps, airport locations, travel patterns and bird migratory routes around the world, said the company. “STEM will allow public health officials to model the spread of a disease much like modeling a storm or hurricane – it allows us to produce a public health ’weather map’ for the spread of a particular disease,” said Joseph Jasinski, IBM Distinguished Engineer and program director, Healthcare and Life Sciences.

A basic epidemiological model framework will be provided to software developers, who can customize and configure the models based on their specific requirements. STEM is one of the key technologies being utilized in the Global Pandemic Initiative, a collaborative effort formed by IBM and over twenty major worldwide public health institutions to help prevent the spread of infectious diseases. According to the company, the tool is also compatible with the standards-based interoperable healthcare infrastructure developed by IBM and can query clinics, hospitals, lab systems and other information sources for anonymized data by disease, which enables a complete picture of the health of a population with real-time data.

"This is just a very cool announcement," said Ian Skerrett, in a blog post. "Granted not everyone needs to track infectious diseases but a goal of contributing it to open source is to encourage innovation and collaboration on the technology. A great example of the open source development model driving innovation," he added.

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