Flu Near You - Vaccine Preventable Diseases remain an issue. People distrust vaccines but because of their success people underestimate the impact of the diseases they prevent. The CDC estimates that the Flu costs $10.4B each year in medical costs. Participatory Health needs to engage the public in Public Health. Participatory surveillance engages the public in monitoring activities. Register by phone or web.Surveys received via email and take less than 10 seconds to complete. Flu Near You helps you find sources for vaccine. Flu Near You reports back on your local community. People like this local knowledge. People like the mobile app. They like to be able to change location. http://flunearyou.org Already 9,000 users. Piloted in San Francisco. 80,000 surveys completed. Partnering with LabCorp to enable local testing. This app is designed to scale globally and to expand to other diseases beyond flu. People find the map is invaluable. They like to interact with the map. Initial engagement will be the challenge. One suggestion was to use the Boy and Girl scout organizations to drive family engagement. eg. a public health awareness badge. Can people identify if they are in a high risk group? This done via Vaccine Finder where high risk groups are identified so that the right vaccine can be identified. FluNearYou is different from traditional reporting methods. Traditional methods use reporting from HealthCare professionals. FlueNearYou offers earlier detection opportunities. Puerto Rico is funding development for other diseases. The real time aspect of this app really helps detection and treatment.
A Health, Social Media and Technology blog by Mark Scrimshire (@ekivemark), Chief Instigator of HealthCa.mp - Empowering Health Care Engagement.
