Brand New Health 2.0 Service – Google Flu Trends
Google announced a new service, ‘Flu Trends‘. Influenza, commonly known as the flu is a serious infectious disease caused by the Influenza RNA viruses. Flu spreads around the world and in some years, it kills millions of people. Three influenza pandemics occured in the 20th century and more than 10 million people died.
Health 2.0: Expansive definition “New concept of health care wherein all the constituents (patients, physicians, providers, and payers) focus on health care value (outcomes/price) and use competition at the medical condition level over the full cycle of care as the catalyst for improving the safety, efficiency, and quality of health care” – Last updated on May 25, 2007 (Source: Scott Shreeve, MD – January 24, 2007)
Google uses the data from their popular ‘Google Trends’ service to predict the flu trends. Google Trend analyzes Google web search queries to compute how many searches done for a term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. (Source: Google Trends – About) Last year, a small team of Google engineers began to explore if there is a correlation between Google search trends and real-world happenings. When they met with the Health Gurus’s on Google.org’s Prevent and Predict Team, they decided to focus on outbreaks of flu. The team found that certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu season, each year. They compared these aggregated queries against data provided by U.S. CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and found a very close relationship between the frequency of the flu-related searc queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms.
The CDC does a great job of surveying real data to track the flu, but traditional flu surveillance systems take more than 1 week to collect, to release and to interpret weekly surveillance data. The first graph is from CDC website and the second graph is from Google Flu Trends and they show us the similarity between Google’s estimated trends and real-time trend.
(Image courtesy of the U.S. CDC)
Image courtesy of Google Flu Trends
Google search queries can be counted very easily and making flu estimates available each day. This system provides an early warning system for outbreaks of influenza. Early detection of a disease is very important to reduce the number of people affected. You can read the Google.org blog post here and ‘How we help track flu trends‘ post on Google official blog.
As i mentioned in the ‘definiton of Health 2.0′ , Google Flu Trends is a new concept for improving efficiency and quality of healthcare. Google Flu Trends is a brand new Health 2.0 application and a pioneer for preventing infectious disease outbreaks and shows us the increasing power of the Internet in our daily lives. Google Flu Trends has offered us an innovative – preventative way instead of treating the disease. Google Health was launched in May, 2008 and we will review Google Health service later.
* I caught flu and Whilst writing this post, i’m still sick; i haven’t been able to go to work for two days. I’ll get vaccinated and follow Google Flu Trends to protect myself against catching flu 
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