Publicly Available Online Tool Facilitates Real-Time Monitoring Of Vaccine Conversations And Sentiments.

Real-time monitoring of mainstream and social media can inform public health practitioners and policy makers about vaccine sentiment and hesitancy. We describe a publicly available platform for monitoring vaccination-related content, called the Vaccine Sentimeter. With automated data collection from 100,000 mainstream media sources and Twitter, natural-language processing for automated filtering, and manual curation to ensure accuracy, the Vaccine Sentimeter offers a global real-time view of vaccination conversations online.

Increasing Patient Engagement in Pharmacovigilance Through Online Community Outreach and Mobile Reporting Applications: An Analysis of Adverse Event Reporting for the Essure Device in the US.

Background: Preparing and submitting a voluntary adverse event (AE) report to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a medical device typically takes 40 min. User-friendly Web and mobile reporting apps may increase efficiency. Further, coupled with strategies for direct patient involvement, patient engagement in AE reporting may be improved.

Comparing timeliness, content, and disease severity of formal and informal source outbreak reporting.

Background: Infectious disease surveillance has recently seen many changes including rapid growth of informal surveillance, acting both as competitor and a facilitator to traditional surveillance, as well as the implementation of the revised International Health Regulations. The present study aims to compare outbreak reporting by formal and informal sources given such changes in the field.

Methods: 111 outbreaks identified from June to December 2012 were studied using first formal source report and first informal source report collected by HealthMap, an automated and curated aggregator of data sources for infectious disease surveillance.