IBM Releases Disease Tracking Software as Open Source

June 11, 2007: IBM has released software to the open source community to help predict the spread of infectious diseases across countries and around the world.

Aptly named the Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM), IBM says the software will help scientists and public health officials understand the spread of infectious diseases and more effectively plan responses to health crises - hopefully stemming the spread of dangerous contagions.

Designed and developed over three years, STEM has been designed quickly create epidemiological models for how an infectious disease, such as avian influenza or dengue fever, is likely to spread.

The tool works by creating a graphical representation of the spread of a disease based on parameters such as population, geographic and macro-economic data, roadmaps, airport locations, travel patterns and bird migratory routes around the world.

“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, a Distinguished Engineer and program director for Healthcare and Life Sciences at IBM.

“Until now, it has been difficult to simulate health crisis scenarios on a global scale. STEM gives us the power to do that.”

IBM says that a basic epidemiological model framework will be provided to software developers, so they can customise and configure models based on their specific requirements, and that the donation is intended to encourage collaboration between governments, scientific researchers and the public health community.

STEM can run on any operating system, is compatible with the standards-based interoperable healthcare infrastructure developed by IBM, and can query clinics, hospitals, lab systems and other information sources for anonymous data by disease. IBM claims this enables a more complete picture of an outbreak as it incorporates real-time data on population health.

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