IBM updates open-source Big Data disease modeling platform

The rise of electronic health records (EHRs) is cutting the time it takes to spot changes in incidence of disease...

IBM and its partners built the open-source modeling platform--called Spatio Temporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM)--to combine data from different sources. Early projects include looking at World Health Organization data on incidence of malaria alongside climate and temperature information. The Eclipse Foundation has made these capabilities freely available to researchers, and is now set to roll out STEM 2.0 later this month, MedCityNews reports.

By opening up the ability to quickly crunch disease data, the collaborators hope to improve the speed and effectiveness of responses to outbreaks. "We have to be ready at the drop of a hat to parse through disparate data from global disease surveillance systems, conduct computationally intense research and transfer our knowledge to public health officials to help them visualize population health, detect outbreaks, develop new models, and evaluate the effectiveness of policies," University of California's Simone Bianco said.