The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded Accenture [ACN] a one-year, $3 million contract to develop a pilot project that relies on monitoring social media to enhance the nation’s bio-surveillance capabilities.
Accenture will take advantage of public interfaces to social media sites to access them and then use its collaboration platform software and analytics to make sense of the information it collects through the interfaces, John Machette, the head of the company’s Public Safety portfolio, tells HSR.
During the project Accenture will establish a “baseline to understand what normal looks like,” Machette says. “Because there’s going to be a lot of posts about your health, and flu and coughing and all kind of things.”
The key will be to understanding anomalies, he says.
“Once you begin to define normal, you then begin to look at the language people use as it relates to health” and then the software analytics determine when there are abnormalities, Machette says.
Regarding potential privacy concerns, Machette says the program isn’t aimed at delving deeply into demographics or peoples lives.
“This program isn’t looking at individual citizens,” Machette says.
He says the information going through the public interfaces “has been voluntarily proffered” and then uses big data analytics to look for spikes.
“It only has accuracy and fidelity when it’s looking at lots and lots of data and then you can begin to get the trends,” Machette says.
Social media sites include Facebook, Twitter, blogs and others.
The contract was awarded by the Office of Health Affairs (OHA), which serves as the department’s principal authority for all medical and health issues and supports its mission to prepare for, respond to, and recover from all threats. OHA manages the BioWatch bio-detection program in major urban areas and the National Biosurveillance Integration Center that integrates bio-monitoring activities of federal departments to provide a biological common operating picture and to help with early detection of potentially harmful events and trends.
While there are ways to detect, the social media bio-surveillance program is meant to supplement existing systems that rely on the determination of an event, which can be limited by the number of machines that are deployed, such as in the BioWatch program, and the time it takes to obtain a result, Machette says. The same is true when a person is tested at a doctor’s office or another medical facility and then has to wait for the results, he says.
“What you are able to do with this approach is you start to take latency out of the process and you start getting hits about health related data very quickly and also you get more sensors…[which] in this system are people,” he says. “And you should get the information faster and you should get a larger variety of data and the success obviously is being able to comb through all of that and predict anomalies that can then be augmented through other means.”
Machette expects to have the pilot project running within a year. Accenture will be using its existing technology in a new application, not creating customized software code, he says.
Accenture also sees the project as a way to improve data sharing between and collaboration.
For the project Accenture plans to leverage its extensive partnerships in the commercial market, in this case with health-related companies such as CVS [CVS] and Walgreens [WAG], to get their advice in an advisory capacity, Machette says.
“Once we’ve built the engine that will handle the analytics for social media, there’s nothing stopping the government from having additional sources of data to improve the fidelity,” he says.