Public health surveillance · Boston Children's Hospital
HealthMap
Free automated system that mines online news and reports to map emerging infectious disease outbreaks in real time.
HealthMap is a research project at Boston Children's Hospital that uses natural-language processing to continuously scan online news aggregators, official reports, and informal sources such as eyewitness accounts in nine languages, then organizes and visualizes the resulting signals as a real-time outbreak map. Unlike wastewater-based tools, it draws on publicly available text rather than laboratory samples, making it fast to pick up early signals from informal sources but dependent on the quality and availability of online reporting in a given region. It played an early-detection role in events including the 2009 H1N1 outbreak and the initial reports of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan in late 2019. HealthMap is freely accessible via its website and companion mobile app, 'Outbreaks Near Me,' and is used by public health organizations including the WHO and CDC as one input among several for situational awareness, rather than as a diagnostic or laboratory-grade surveillance system.
At a glance
| Vendor | Boston Children's Hospital |
|---|---|
| Pricing model | Free |
| Free tier | Yes |
| Deployment | Cloud |
| Open source | No |
| Best for | Public health agencies and travelers wanting free, early, text-based situational awareness of emerging outbreaks. |
Pricing
Freely accessible website and mobile app; not a paid product.
Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.
Features
- Automated NLP mining of online news and reports
- Real-time outbreak map visualization
- Coverage across nine languages
- Informal-source (eyewitness/social) signal detection
- 'Outbreaks Near Me' consumer mobile app
- Multi-disease, global outbreak tracking
- Free public access
Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026